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14-1 1. Ho, I 



I .' • o 




&arbarb College li&rarp 



FROM 



Curt Raising*? 




t-f 



tl- 



BY GEORGE SANTAYANA 

The Life of Reason: or the Phases of 

Human Progress 

I. Introduction and Reason in Common Sense 
II. Reason in Society 

III. Reason in Religion 

IV. Reason in Art 

V. Reason in Science 

The Sense of Beauty 

Interpretations of Poetry and Religion 

A Hermit of Carm el and Other Pcems 

Winds of Doctrine 

Character and Opinion in the United 

States 
Soliloquies in England and Later 

Soliloquies 
Poems 

Little Essays Drawn from the Works of 
George Santa yana. By Logan Pearsall 
Smith, with the collaboration of the Author, 
lamo. 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 



THE SENSE OF BEAUTY 



THE 



SENSE OF BEAUTY 



The Outlines or JEsthktio Thxobi 



GEOEGE SANTAYANA 



CHARLES SCBIBNER'S SONS 

NIW YORK CHICAGO BOSTON 



RL'x. S<f/f. t-jQ.c 

•XT--' ""• 



HARVARD 

lUNIVERSITYl 

LIBRARY 

otP zb 1952 



Cofyught, 1806, bt 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 



Muted i» the United States of America 
I 




PREFACE 

This little work contains the chief ideas gathered 
together for a course of lectures on the theory and 
history of aesthetics given at Harvard College from 
1892 to 1895. The only originality I can claim is 
that which may result from the attempt to put 
together the scattered commonplaces of criticism 
into a system, under the inspiration of a naturalistic 
psychology. I nave studied sincerity rather than 
novelty, and if any subject, as for instance the 
excellence of tragedy, is presented in a new light, 
the change consists only in the stricter application 
to a complex subject of the principles acknowledged 
to obtain in our simple judgments. My effort 
throughout has been to recall those fundamental 
aesthetic feelings the orderly extension of which 
yields sanity of judgment and distinction of taste. 

The influences under which the book has been 
written are rather too general and pervasive to 
admit of specification ; yet the student of philoso- 
phy will not fail to perceive how much I owe to 



yi FBEFAOB 

writei^^Dth living and dead, to whom no honour 
could fc%,$flded by my acknowledgments. I have 
usuaU^MHlted any reference to them in foot-notes 
or in tilfrtMlt in order that the air of controversy 
might kIMllH and the reader might be enabled 
to comymr til^ is said more directly with the 
reality otMi#WMxperience. 

a & 

terr in, IWi 



CONTENTS 



Introduction. The Methods of 2Estheticb . 1-13 

Part I. The Nature of Beauty 

§ 1. The philosophy of beauty is a theory of 

values ....... 14 

§ 2. Preference is ultimately irrational . • 18 

§ 3. Contrast between moral and esthetic values 23 

§ 4. Work and play 25 

§ 5. All values are in one sense aesthetic . . 28 

§ 6. JEsthetic consecration of general principles 31 

§ 7. Contrast of aesthetic and physical pleasures 35 
§ 8. The differentia of aesthetic pleasure not its 

disinterestedness 37 

§ 9. The differentia of aesthetic pleasure not its 

universality 40 

§10. The differentia of esthetic pleasure: its 

objectification 44 

§ 11. The definition of beauty . • . . 40 

Part IL The Materials of Beauty 

§ 12. All human functions may contribute to the 

sense of beauty 53 

§ 13. The influence of the passion of love . • 56 

§ 14. Social instincts and their aesthetic influence 02 

§15. The lower senses . .... 05 

vU 



fiii CONTENTS 



f 16. Sound 68 

S 17. Colour 72 

§18. Materials surveyed 76 

Part III. Form 



1 19. There is a beauty of form . 

S 20. Physiology of the perception of form 

§ 21. Values of geometrical figures 

1 22. Symmetry 

§ 23. Form the unity of a manifold . 

§ 24. Multiplicity in uniformity . 

§ 25. Example of the stars .... 

§ 26. Defects of pure multiplicity 

§ 27. ^Esthetics of democracy 

§ 28. Values of types and values of examples 

§ 29. Origin of types 

§80. The average modified in the direction of 
pleasure 

§31. Are all things beautiful? . 

§ 32. Effects of indeterminate form • 

§33. Example of landscape 

§ 34. Extensions to objects usually not regarded 
S3sthetically 

§ 35. Further dangers of indeterminateness 

§ 36. The illusion of infinite perfection 

§ 37. Organized nature the source of appercep- 
tive forms 

§88. Utility the principle of organization in 
nature 

§89. The relation of utility to beauty 

§ 40. Utility the principle of organization in the 
arts ...... 

§ 41. Form and adventitious ornament 

§42. Form in words 



85 

88 

91 

95 

97 

100 

106 

110 

112 

116 

121 
126 
131 
133 

138 
142 
146 

152 

155 
157 

160 
163 
167 



CONTENTS 



§48. Syntactical form 171 

§44. Literary form. The plot . ... 174 
§ 45. Character at an esthetic torn • • .176 

§46. Ideal characters 180 

§47. The religious imagination . • • • 185 

Part IV. Expression 

§48. Expression defined 192 

§ 49. The associative process . 198 

§50. Kinds of value in the second term • . 201 

§ 51. JEsthetic value in the second term • . 205 

§ 52. Practical value in the same • . • 208 

§ 53. Cost as an element of effect • • 211 

§ 54. The expression of economy and fitness • 214 

§ 55. The authority of morals over aesthetics . 218 

§ 56. Negative values in the second term . • 221 
§ 57. Influence of the first term in the pleasing 

expression of evil ..... 226 
§58. Mixture of other expressions, including 

that of truth 228 

§ 59. The liberation of self 283 

§ 60. The sublime independent of the expression 

of evil 289 

§ 61. The comic 245 

§62. Wit 250 

§63. Humour 253 

§64. The grotesque 256 

§65. The possibility of finite perfection . . 258 

§ 66. The stability of the ideal .... 263 

Conclusion • •••».. 266-270 

Index • * 271-275 



INTRODUCTION 

Thx sense of beauty has a more important place 
in life than aesthetic theory has ever taken in phi- 
losophy. The plastic arts, with poetry and music, 
are the most conspicuous monuments of this hu- 
man interest, because they appeal only to contem- 
plation! and yet have attracted to their service, 
in all civilized ages, an amount of effort, genius, 
and honour, little inferior to that given to indus- 
try, war, or religion. The fine arts, however, 
where aesthetic feeling, appears almost pure, are 
by no means the only sphere in which men show 
their susceptibility to beauty. In all products of 
human industry we notice the keenness with which 
the eye is attracted to the mere appearance of 
things: great sacrifices of time and labour are 
made to it in the most vulgar manufactures; nor 
does man select his dwelling, his clothes, or his 
companions without reference to their effect on 
his aesthetic senses. Of late we have even 
learned that the forms of many animals are due 
to the survival by sexual selection of the colours 
and forms most attractive to the eye. There 
must therefore be in our nature a very radical 
and wide-spread tendency to observe beauty, and 
to value it. No account of the principles of the 
3 1 



2 THE SENSE OF BEAUTY 

mind can be at all adequate that passes over so 
conspicuous a faculty. 

That aesthetic theory has received so little 
attention from the world is not due to the unim- 
portance of the subject of which it treats, but 
rather to lack of an adequate motive for specu- 
lating upon it, and to the small success of the 
occasional efforts to deal with it. Absolute curi- 
osity! and love of comprehension for its own 
sake, are not passions we have much leisure to 
indulge: they require not only freedom from 
affairs but, what is more rare, freedom from pre- 
possessions and from the hatred of all ideas that 
do not make for the habitual goal of our thought. 

Now, what has chiefly maintained such spec- 
ulation as the world has seen has been either 
theological passion or practical use. All we find, 
for example, written about beauty may be divided 
into two groups : that group of writings in which 
philosophers have interpreted aesthetic facts in 
the light of their metaphysical principles, and 
made of their theory of taste a corollary or foot- 
note to their systems; and that group in which 
artists and critics have ventured into philosophic 
ground, by generalizing somewhat the maxims of 
the craft or the comments of the sensitive ob- 
server. A treatment of the subject at once direct 
and theoretic has been very rare : the problems of 
nature and morals have attracted the reasoners, and 
the description and creation of beauty have absorbed 
the artists ; between the two reflection upon aesthetic 
experience has remained abortive or incoherent. 



mBODDcmov I 

A circumstance that has also contributed to 
the absence or to the failure of aesthetic specu- 
lation is the subjectivity of the phenomenon with 
which it deals. Man has a prejudice against 
himself: anything which is a product of his 
mind seems to him to be unreal or compara- 
tively insignificant. We are satisfied only when 
we fancy ourselves surrounded by objects and 
laws independent of our nature. The ancients 
long speculated about the constitution of the 
universe before they became aware of that mind 
which is the instrument of all speculation. The 
moderns, also, even within the field of psychol- 
ogy, have studied first the function of perception 
and the theory of knowledge! by which we seem 
to be informed about external tilings; they have 
in comparison neglected the exclusively subjec- 
tive and human department of imagination and 
emotion. We have still to recognize in practice 
the truth that from these despised feelings of 
ours the great world of perception derives all its 
value, if not also its existence. Things are in- 
teresting because we care about them, and impor- 
tant because we need them. Had our perceptions 
no connexion with our pleasures! we should soon 
close our eyes on this world; if our intelligence 
were of no service to our passions, we should come 
to doubt, in the lazy freedom of reverie, whether 
two and two make four. 

Yet so strong is the popular sense of the 
unworthinesB and insignificance of things purely 
emotional, that those who have taken moral 



4 THE SENSE OF BEAUTY 

problems to heart and felt their dignity have 
often been led into attempts to discover some 
external right and beauty of which our moral 
and esthetic feelings should be perceptions or 
discoveries, just as our intellectual activity is, in 
men's opinion, a perception or discovery of 
external fact. These philosophers seem to feel 
that unless moral and aesthetic judgments are 
expressions of objective truth, and not merely 
expressions of human nature, they stand con- 
demned of hopeless triviality. A judgment is not 
trivial, however, because it rests on human feel- 
ings; on the contrary, triviality consists in abstrac- 
tion from human interests; only those judgments 
and opinions are truly insignificant which wander 
beyond the reach of verification, and have no func- 
tion in the ordering and enriching of life. 

Both ethics and aesthetics have suffered much 
from the prejudice against the subjective. They 
have not suffered more because both have a sub- 
ject-matter which is partly objective. Ethics 
deals with conduct as much as with emotion, and 
therefore considers the causes of events and their 
consequences as well as our judgments of their 
value. ^Esthetics also is apt to include the 
history and philosophy of art, and to add much 
descriptive and critical matter to the theory of 
our susceptibility to beauty. A certain confusion 
is thereby introduced into these inquiries, but at 
the same time the discussion is enlivened by ex- 
cursions into neighbouring provinces, perhaps more 
interesting to the general reader. 



INTRODUCTION 5 

We may, however, distinguish three distinct 
elements of ethics and aesthetics, and three 
different ways of approaching the subject. The 
first is the exercise of the moral or aesthetic 
faculty itself, the actual pronouncing of judg- 
ment and giving of praise, blame, and precept. 
This is not a matter of science but of character, 
enthusiasm, niceness of perception, and fineness 
of emotion. It is aesthetic or moral activity, 
while ethics and aesthetics, as sciences, are intel- 
lectual activities, having that aesthetic or moral 
activity for their subject-matter. 

The second method consists in the historical 
explanation of conduct or of art as a part of an- 
thropology, and seeks to discover the conditions 
of various types of character, forms of polity, 
conceptions of justice, and schools of criticism 
and of art. Of this nature is a great deal of 
what has been written on aesthetics. The phi- 
losophy of art has often proved a more tempting 
subject than the psychology of taste, especially 
to minds which were not so much fascinated by 
beauty itself as by the curious problem of the 
artistic instinct in man and of the diversity of 
its manifestations in history. 

The third method in ethics and aesthetics is 
psychological, as the other two are respectively 
didactic and historical. It deals with moral and 
aesthetic judgments as phenomena of mind and 
products of mental evolution. The problem here 
is to understand the origin and conditions of 
these feelings and their relation to the rest of 



6 THE SENSE OF BEAUTY 

our economy. Such an inquiry, if pursued sue* 
cessfully, would yield an understanding of the 
reason why we think anything right or beautiful, 
wrong or ugly; it would thus reveal the roots of 
conscience and taste in human nature and enable 
us to distinguish transitory preferences and ideals, 
which rest on peculiar conditions, from those which, 
springing from those elements of mind which all 
men share, are comparatively permanent and uni- 
versal. 

To this inquiry, as far as it concerns aesthetics, 
the following pages are devoted. No attempt will 
be made either to impose particular appreciations 
or to trace the history of art and criticism. The 
discussion will be limited to the nature and ele- 
ments of our aesthetic judgments. It is a theo- 
retical inquiry and has no directly hortatory 
quality. Yet insight into the basis of our prefer- 
ences, if it could be gained, would not fail to 
have a good and purifying influence upon them. 
It would show us the futility of a dogmatism that 
would impose upon another man judgments and 
emotions for which the needed soil is lacking in 
his constitution and experience; and at the same 
time it would relieve us of any undue diffidence 
or excessive tolerance towards aberrations of taste, 
when we know what are the broader grounds of 
preference and the habits that make for greater 
and more diversified aesthetic enjoyment. 

Therefore, although nothing has commonly been 
less attractive than treatises on beauty or less a 
guide to taste than disquisitions upon it, we may 



INTRODUCTION T 

yet hope for some not merely theoretical gain 
from these studies. They have remained so often 
without practical influence because they have 
been pursued under unfavourable conditions. The 
writers have generally been audacious meta- 
physicians and somewhat incompetent critics; 
they have represented general and obscure prin- 
ciples, suggested by other parts of their philoso- 
phy, as the conditions of artistic excellence and 
the essence of beauty. But if the inquiry is 
kept close to the facts of feeling, we may hope 
that the resulting theory may have a clarifying 
effect on the experience on which it is based. 
That is, after all, the use of theory. If when a 
theory is bad it narrows our capacity for obser- 
vation and makes all appreciation vicarious and 
formal, when it is good it reacts favourably upon 
our powers, guides the attention to what is really 
capable of affording entertainment, and increases, 
by force of new analogies, the range of our in- 
terests. Speculation is an evil if it imposes a for- 
eign organization on our mental life; it is a good 
if it only brings to light, and makes more per- 
fect by training, the organization already inherent 
in it. 

We shall therefore study human sensibility 
itself and our actual feelings about beauty, and 
we shall look for no deeper, unconscious causes 
of our aesthetic consciousness. Such value as 
belongs to metaphysical derivations of the nature 
of the beautiful, comes to them not because they 
explain our primary feelings, which they cannot 



8 THE SENSE OF BEAUTY 

do, but because they express, and in fact consti- 
tute, some of our later appreciations. There is 
no explanation, for instance, in calling beauty 
an adumbration of divine attributes. Such a 
relation, if it were actual, would not help us at 
all to understand why the symbols of divinity 
pleased. But in certain moments of contempla- 
tion, when much emotional experience lies behind 
us, and we have reached very general ideas both 
of nature and of life, our delight in any par- 
ticular object may consist in nothing but the 
thought that this object is a manifestation of 
universal principles. The blue sky may come 
to please chiefly because it seems the image of 
a serene conscience, or of the eternal youth and 
purity of nature after a thousand partial corrup- 
tions. But this expressiveness of the sky is due 
to certain qualities of the sensation, which bind 
it to all things happy and pure, and, in a mind 
in which the essence of purity and happiness is 
embodied in an idea of God, bind it also to that 
idea* 

So it may happen that the most arbitrary and 
unreal theories, which must be rejected as general 
explanations of aesthetic life, may be reinstated 
as particular moments of it. Those intuitions 
which we call Platonic are seldom scientific, they 
seldom explain the phenomena or hit upon the 
actual law of things, but they are often the high- 
est expression of that activity which they fail to 
make comprehensible. The adoring lover cannot 
understand the natural history of love; for he is 



INTRODUCTION 9 

all in all at the last and supreme stage of its 
development. Hence the world has always been 
puzzled in its judgment of the Platonists; their 
theories are so extravagant, yet their wisdom 
seems so great. Platonism is a very refined and 
beautiful expression of our natural instincts, it 
embodies conscience and utters our inmost hopes. 
Platonic philosophers have therefore a natural 
authority, as standing on heights to which the 
vulgar cannot attain, but to which they naturally 
and half -consciously aspire. 

When a man tells you that beauty is the man- 
ifestation of God to the senses, you wish you 
might understand him, you grope for a deep truth 
in his obscurity, you honour him for his elevation 
of mind, and your respect may even induce you to 
assent to what he says as to an intelligible propo- 
sition. Your thought may in consequence be dom- 
inated ever after by a verbal dogma, around which 
all your sympathies and antipathies will quickly 
gather, and the less you have penetrated the origi- 
nal sense of your creed, the more absolutely will 
you believe it. Tou will have followed Mephis- 
topheles' advice : — 

Im ganzen haltet euch an Worte, 
So geht euch durch die sicbere Pf orte 
Znm Tempel der Gewissheit ein. 

Yet reflection might have shown you that the 
word of the master held no objective account of 
the nature and origin of beauty, but was the 
vague expression of his highly complex emotions. 



10 THE SENSE OF BEAUTY 

It is one of the attributes of God, one of the 
perfections which we contemplate in our idea of 
him, that there is no duality or opposition 
between his will and his vision, between the 
impulses of his nature and the events of his life. 
This is what we commonly designate as omnip- 
otence and creation. Now, in the contemplation 
of beauty, our faculties of perception have the 
same perfection : it is indeed from the experience 
of beauty and happiness, from the occasional har- 
mony between our nature and our environment, 
that we draw our conception of the divine life. 
There is, then, a real propriety in calling beauty 
a manifestation of God to the senses, since, in 
the region of sense, the perception of beauty 
exemplifies that adequacy and perfection which 
in general we objectify in an idea of God. 

But the minds that dwell in the atmosphere of 
these analogies are hardly those that will care to 
ask what are the conditions and the varieties of 
this perfection of function, in other words, how 
it oomes about that we perceive beauty at all, or 
have any inkling of divinity. Only the other 
philosophers, those that wallow in Epicurus' sty, 
know anything about the latter question. But it 
is easier to be impressed than to be instructed, 
and the public is very ready to believe that where 
there is noble language not without obscurity 
there must be profound knowledge. We should 
distinguish, however, the two distinct demands 
in the case. One is for comprehension; we look 
for the theory of a human function which must 



INTRODUCTION 11 

oover all possible oases of its exercise, whether 
noble or base. This the Platonists utterly fail 
to give us. The other demand is for inspira- 
tion; we wish to be nourished by the maxims 
and confessions of an exalted mind, in whom the 
SBsthetic function is pre-eminent. By responding 
to this demand the same thinkers may win our 
admiration. 

To feel beauty is a better thing than to under- 
stand how we come to feel it. To have imagina- 
tion and taste, to love the best, to be carried by 
the contemplation of nature to a vivid faith in 
the ideal, all this is more, a great deal more, 
than any science can hope to be. The poets and 
philosophers who express this aesthetic experience 
and stimulate the same function in us by their 
example, do a greater service to mankind and 
deserve higher honour than the discoverers of 
historical truth. Reflection is indeed a part of 
life, but the last part. Its specific value consists 
in the satisfaction of curiosity, in the smoothing 
out and explanation of things: but the greatest 
pleasure which we actually get from reflection is 
borrowed from the experience on which we re- 
flect. We do not often indulge in retrospect for 
the sake of a scientific knowledge of human life, 
but rather to revive the memories of what once 
was dear. And I should have little hope of inter- 
esting the reader in the present analyses! did I 
not rely on the attractions of a subject associated 
with so many of his pleasures. 

But the recognition ox the superiority of 



12 THE SIN8E OF BEAUTY 

aesthetics in experience to aesthetics in theory 
ought not to make us accept as an explanation 
of aesthetic feeling what is in truth only an 
expression of it. When Plato tells us of the 
eternal ideas in conformity to which all excellence 
consists, he is making himself the spokesman of 
the moral consciousness. Our conscience and taste 
establish these ideals; to make a judgment is 
virtually to establish an ideal, and all ideals are 
absolute and eternal for the judgment that in- 
volves them, because in finding and declaring a 
thing good or beautiful, our sentence is cate- 
gorical, and the standard evoked by our judgment 
is for that case intrinsic and ultimate. But at 
the next moment, when the mind is on another 
footing, a new ideal is evoked, no less absolute 
for the present judgment than the old ideal was 
for the previous one. If we are then expressing 
our feeling and confessing what happens to us 
when we judge, we shall be quite right in saying 
that we have always an absolute ideal before us, 
and that value lies in conformity with that ideal. 
So, also, if we try to define that ideal, we shall 
hardly be able to say of it anything less noble 
and more definite than that it is the embodiment 
of an infinite good. For it is that incommuni- 
cable and illusive excellence that haunts every 

beautiful thing, and 

like a star 
Beaoons from the abode where the eternal are. 

For the expression of this experience we should 
go to the poets, to the more inspired critics, and 



INTRODUCTION IS 

best of all to the immortal parables of Plato. 
But if what we desire is to increase our knowl- 
edge rather than to cultivate our sensibility, we 
should do well to close all those delightful books; 
for we shall not find any instruction there upon 
the questions which most press upon us; namely, 
how an ideal is formed in the mind, how a given 
object is compared with it, what is the common 
element in all beautiful things, and what the 
substance of the absolute ideal in which all ideals 
tend to be lost; and, finally, how we come to be 
sensitive to beauty at all, or to value it. These 
questions must be capable of answers, if any 
science of human nature is really possible. — So 
far, then, are we from ignoring the insight of the 
Platonists, that we hope to explain it, and in a 
sense to justify it, by showing that it is the 
natural and sometimes the supreme expression of 
the common principles of our nature. 



PART I 

THE NATURE OP BEAUTY 

TtopMkmpk, § L It would be easy to find a defini* 

Of bHttftU If 

m vnoryof tion of beauty that should give in a few 



words a telling paraphrase of the word. 
We know on excellent authority that beauty is 
truth, that it is the expression of the ideal, the 
symbol of divine perfection, and the sensible mani- 
festation of the good. A litany of these titles of 
honour might easily be compiled, and repeated in 
praise of our divinity. Such phrases stimulate 
thought and give us a momentary pleasure, but 
they hardly bring any permanent enlightenment 
A definition that should really define must be noth- 
ing less thait the exposition of the origin, place, and 
elements of beauty as an object of human experi- 
ence. We must learn from it, as far as possible, 
why, when, and how beauty appears, what condi- 
tions an object must fulfil to be beautiful, what 
elements of our nature make us sensible of beauty, 
and what the relation is between the constitution 
of the object and the excitement of our suscepti- 
bility. Nothing less will really define beauty or 
make us understand what aesthetic appreciation is. 
The definition of beauty in this sense will be the 
U 



THE NATURE OF BEAUTY 15 

teak of this whole book, a task that can be only 
very imperfectly accomplished within its limits. 

The historical titles of our subject may give us 
a hint towards the beginning of such a definition. 
Many writers of the last century called the phi- 
losophy of beauty Criticism, and the word is still 
retained as the title for the reasoned appreciation 
of works of art We could hardly speak, however, 
of delight in nature as criticism. A sunset is not 
criticised ; it is felt and enjoyed. The word " criti- 
cism/' used on such an occasion, would emphasize 
too much die element of deliberate judgment and 
of comparison with standards. Beauty, although 
often so described, is seldom so perceived, and all 
the greatest excellences of nature and art are so 
far from being approved of by a rule that they 
themselves furnish the standard and ideal by which 
critics measure inferior effects. 

This age of science and of nomenclature has ac- 
cordingly adopted a more learned word, ^Esthetics, 
that is, the theory of perception or of susceptibility. 
If criticism is too narrow a word, pointing exclu- 
sively to our more artificial judgments, aesthetics 
seems to be too broad and to include within its 
sphere all pleasures and pains, if not all percep- 
tions whatsoever. Kant used it, as we know, for 
his theory of time and space as forms of all per- 
ception; and it has at times been narrowed into an 
equivalent for the philosophy of art. 

If we combine, however, the etymological mean- 
ing of criticism with that of aesthetics, we shall 
unite two essential qualities of the theory of 



16 THE SIN8E OF BEAUTY 

beauty. Criticism implies judgment, and aesthet- 
ics perception. To get the common ground, that 
of perceptions which are critical, or judgments 
which are perceptions, we must widen our notion 
of deliberate criticism so as to include those judg- 
ments of value which are instinctive and immediate, 
that is, to include pleasures and pains; and at the 
same time we must narrow our notion of aesthetics 
so as to exclude all perceptions which are not appre- 
ciations, which do not find a value in their objects. 
We thus reach the sphere of critical or appreciative 
perception, which is, roughly speaking, what we 
mean to deal with. And retaining the word " aes- 
thetics, " which is now current, we may therefore 
say that aesthetics is concerned with the percep- 
tion of values. The meaning and conditions of 
value is, then, what we must first consider. 

Since the days of Descartes it has been a con- 
ception familiar to philosophers that every visible 
event in nature might be explained by previous 
visible events, and that all the motions, for in- 
stance, of the tongue in speech, or of the hand in 
painting, might have merely physical causes. If 
consciousness is thus accessory to life and not 
essential to it, the race of man might have existed 
upon the earth and acquired all the arts necessary 
for its subsistence without possessing a single sen- 
sation, idea, or emotion. Natural selection might 
have secured the survival of those automata which 
made useful reactions upon their environment. An 
instinct of self-preservation would have been de- 
veloped, dangers would have been shunned with" 



THE MATURE OF BEAUTY IT 

out being feared, and injuries revenged without 
being felt. 

In such a world there might hare come to be 
the most perfect organization. There would hare 
been what we should call the expression of the 
deepest interests and the apparent pursuit of con- 
ceived goods. For there would have been spon- 
taneous and ingrained tendencies to avoid certain 
contingencies and to produce others; all the 
dumb show and evidence of thinking would have 
been patent to the observer. Yet there would 
surely have been no thinking, no expectation, and 
no conscious achievement in the whole process. 

The onlooker might have feigned ends and objects 
of forethought, as we do in the case of the water 
that seeks its own level, or in that of the vacuum 
which nature abhors. But the particles of matter 
would have remained unconscious of their colloca- 
tion, and all nature would have been insensible of 
their changing arrangement. We only, the pos- 
sible spectators of that process, by virtue of our 
own interests and habits, could see any progress 
or culmination in it. We should see culmination 
where the result attained satisfied our practical 
or aesthetic demands, and progress wherever such 
a satisfaction was approached. But apart from 
ourselves, and our human bias, we can see in 
such a mechanical world no element of value 
whatever. In removing consciousness, we have 
removed the possibility of worth. 

But it is not only in the absence of all con- 
sciousness that value would be removed from the 



18 THE SENSE OF BEAUTY 

world; by a less violent abstraction from the total* 
ity of human experience, we might conceive beings 
of a purely intellectual cast, minds in which the 
transformations of nature were mirrored without 
any emotion. Every event would then be noted, 
its relations would be observed, its recurrence 
might even be expected; but all this would hap- 
pen without a shadow of desire, of pleasure, or of 
regret. No event would be repulsive, no situa- 
tion terrible. We might, in a word, have a world 
of idea without a world of will. In this case, as 
completely as if consciousness were absent alto- 
gether, all value and excellence would be gone. 
So that for the existence of good in any form it 
is not merely consciousness but emotional con- 
sciousness that is needed. Observation will not 
do, appreciation is required. 

fh«fv**e* § 2. We may therefore at once assert 

k^onaL* *&** axiom, important for all moral phi- 
losophy and fatal to certain stubborn 
incoherence? of thought, that there is no value 
apart from some appreciation of it, and no good 
apart from some preference of it before its absence 
or its opposite. In appreciation, in preference, lies 
the root and essence of all excellence. Or, as 
Spinoza clearly expresses it, we desire nothing be- 
cause it is good*, but it is good only because we 
desire it. 

It is true that in the absence of an instinctive 
reaction we can still apply these epithets by an 
appeal to usage. We may agree that an action 



THE NATURE OF BEAUTY 19 

is bad, or a building good, because we recognize 
in them a character which we hare learned to 
designate by that adjective; but unless there is 
in us some trace of passionate reprobation or of 
sensible delight, there is no moral or aesthetic 
judgment. It is all a question of propriety of 
speech, and of the empty titles of things. The 
verbal and mechanical proposition, that passes for 
judgment of worth, is the great cloak of inepti- 
tude in these matters. Insensibility is very quick 
in the conventional use of words. If we appealed 
more often to actual feeling, our judgments would 
be more diverse, but they would be more legiti- 
mate and instructive. Verbal judgments are often 
useful instruments of thought, but it is not by 
them that worth can ultimately be determined. 

Values spring from the immediate and inex- 
plicable reaction of vital impulse, and from the 
irrational part of our nature. The rational part 
is by its essence relative; it leads us from data 
to conclusions, or from parts to wholes; it never 
furnishes the data with which it works. If any 
preference or precept were declared to be ultimate 
and primitive, it would thereby be declared to be 
irrational, since mediation, inference, and syn- 
thesis are the essence of rationality. The ideal 
of rationality is itself as arbitrary, as much de- 
pendent on the needs of a finite organization, as 
any other ideal. Only as ultimately securing tran- 
quillity of mind, which the philosopher instinc- 
tively pursues, has it for him any necessity. In 
spite of the verbal propriety of saying that reason 



20 THE 8EN8E OF BEAUTT 

demands rationality, what really demands ration* 
ality, what makes it a good and indispensable 
thing and gives it all its authority, is not its 
own nature, but our need of it both in safe and 
economical action and in the pleasures of com- 
prehension. 

It is evident that beauty is a species of value, 
and what we have said of value in general applies 
to this particular kind. A first approach to a 
definition of beauty has therefore been made by 
the exclusion of all intellectual judgments, all 
judgments of matter of fact or of relation. To 
substitute judgments of fact for judgments of 
value, is a sign of a pedantic and borrowed criti- 
cism. If we approach a work of art or nature 
scientifically, for the sake of its historical con- 
nexions or proper classification, we do not ap- 
proach it aesthetically. The discovery of its date 
or of its author may be otherwise interesting; it 
only remotely affects our aesthetic appreciation 
by adding to the direct effect certain associations. 
If the direct effect were absent, and the object 
in itself uninteresting, the circumstances would 
be immaterial. Moliere's Misanthrope says to the 
court poet who commends his sonnet as written 
in a quarter of an hour, 

Voyons, monsieur, le temps ne fait rien k l'affaire, 

and so we might say to the critic that sinks into 
the archaeologist, show us the work, and let the 
date alone. 
In an opposite direction the same substitution 



THE NATUHE OF BEAUTY 31 

of facts for values makes its appearance, when- 
ever the reproduction of fact is made the sole 
standard of artistic excellence. Many half-trained 
observers condemn the work of some naive or 
fanciful masters with a sneer, because! as they 
truly say, it is out of drawing. The implica- 
tion is that to be correctly copied from a model 
is the prerequisite of all beauty. * Correctness is, 
indeed, an element of effect and one which, in 
respect to familiar objects, is almost indispen- 
sable, because its absence would cause a disap- 
pointment and dissatisfaction incompatible with 
enjoyment. We learn to value truth more and 
more as our love and knowledge of nature in- 
crease. But fidelity is a merit only becsfase it is 
in this way a factor in our pleasure. It stands on 
a level with all other ingredients of effect. When 
a man raises it to a solitary pre-eminence and 
becomes incapable of appreciating anything else, 
he betrays the decay of aesthetic capacity. The 
scientific habit in him inhibits the artistic. 

That facts have a value of their own, at once 
complicates and explains this question. We are 
naturally pleased by every perception, and recog- 
nition and surprise are particularly acute sensa- 
tions. When we see a striking truth in any 
imitation, we are therefore delighted, and this 
kind of pleasure is very legitimate, and enters 
into the best effects of all the representative 
arts. Truth and realism are therefore aestheti- 
cally good, but they are not all-sufficient, since 
the representation of everything is not equally 



14 THE 8EF8B OF BBAUTT 

rebel against the assertion that the aim of righft 
conduct is enjoyment. Pleasure usually appears 
to them as a temptation, and they sometimes go 
so far as to make avoidance of it a virtue. The 
truth is that morality is not mainly concerned 
with the attainment of pleasure; it is rather con* 
earned, in all its deeper and more authoritative 
maxims, with the prevention of suffering. There 
is something artificial in the deliberate pursuit of 
pleasure; there is something absurd in the obli- 
gation to enjoy oneself. We feel no duty in that 
direction; we take to enjoyment naturally enough 
after the work of life is done, and the freedom 
and spontaneity of our pleasures is what is most 
essential to them. 

The sad business of life is rather to escape cer- 
tain dreadful evils to which our nature exposes us, 
— death, hunger, disease, weariness, isolation, and 
contempt. By the awful authority of these things, 
which stand like spectres behind every moral in- 
junction, conscience in reality speaks, and a mind 
which they have duly impressed cannot but feel, 
by contrast, the hopeless triviality of the search for 
pleasure. It cannot but feel that a life abandoned 
to amusement and to changing impulses must run 
unawares into fatal dangers. The moment, how- 
ever, that society emerges from the early pressure 
of the environment and is tolerably secure against 
primary evils, morality grows lax. The forms that 
life will farther assume are not to be imposed by 
moral authority, but are determined by the genius 
of the race, the opportunities of the moment, and 



THE NATURE OF BEAUTY 35 

the tastes and resources of individual minds. The 
reign of duty gives place to the reign of freedom, 
and the law and the covenant to the dispensation 
of grace. 

The appreciation of beauty and its embodiment 
in the arts are activities which belong to our holi- 
day life, when we are redeemed for the moment 
from the shadow of evil and the slavery to fear, 
and are following the bent of our nature where it 
chooses to lead us. The values, then, with which 
we here deal are positive; they were negative in 
the sphere of morality. The ugly is hardly an 
exception, because it is not the cause of any real 
pain. In itself it is rather a source of amuse- 
ment. If its suggestions are vitally repulsive, its 
presence becomes a real evil towards which we 
assume a practical and moral attitude. And, cor- 
respondingly, the pleasant is never, as iye have 
seen, the object of a truly moral injunction. 

§4. We have here, then, an impor- Work*** 
tant element of the distinction between p,ay ' 
aesthetic and moral values. It is the same that 
has been pointed to in the famous contrast between 
work and play. These terms may be used in differ- 
ent senses and their importance in moral classifi- 
cation differs with the meaning attached to them. 
We may call everything play which is useless 
activity, exercise that springs from the physio- 
logical impulse to discharge the energy which 
the exigencies of life have not called out. Work 
will then be all action that is neoessary or useful 



26 THE SENSE OF BEAUTY 

for life. Evidently if work and play are thus 
objectively distinguished as useful and useless 
action, work is a eulogistic term and play a dis- 
paraging one. It would be better for us that all 
our energy should be turned to account, that none 
of it should be wasted in aimless motion. Play, 
in this sense, is a sign of imperfect adaptation. 
It is proper to childhood, when the body and 
mind are not yet fit to cope with the environ- 
ment, but it is unseemly in manhood and pitiable 
in old age, because it marks an atrophy of human 
nature, and a failure to take hold of the oppor- 
tunities of life. 

Play is thus essentially frivolous. Some per- 
sons, understanding the term in this sense, have 
felt an aversion! which every liberal mind will 
share, to classing social pleasures, art, and reli- 
gion under the head of play, and by that epithet 
condemning them, as a certain school seems to 
do, to gradual extinction as the race approaches 
maturity. But if all the useless ornaments of 
our life are to be cut off in the process of adap- 
tation, evolution would impoverish instead of 
enriching our nature. Perhaps that is the ten- 
dency of evolution, and our barbarous ancestors 
amid their toils and wars, with their flaming 
passions and mythologies, lived better lives than 
are reserved to our well-adapted descendants. 

We may be allowed to hope, however, that some 
imagination may survive parasitically even in 
the most serviceable brain. Whatever course his- 
tory may take, — and we are not here concerned 



THE NATURE OF BEAUTY 27 

with prophecy, — the question of what is desir- 
able is not affected. To condemn spontaneous 
and delightful occupations because they are use- 
less for self-preservation shows an uncritical priz- 
ing of life irrespective of its content. For such 
a system the worthiest function of the universe 
should be to establish perpetual motion. Use- 
lessness is a fatal accusation to bring against 
any act which is done for its presumed utility, 
but those which are done for their own sake are 
their own justification. 

At the same time there is an undeniable pro- 
priety in calling all the liberal and imaginative 
activities of man play, because they are spontane- 
ous, and not carried on under pressure of external 
necessity or danger. Their utility for self-pres- 
ervation may be very indirect and accidental, 
but they are not worthless for that reason. On 
the contrary, we may measure the degree of 
happiness and civilization which any race has 
attained by the proportion of its energy which 
is devoted to free and generous pursuits, to the 
adornment of life and the culture of the imagi- 
nation. For it is in the spontaneous play of his 
faculties that man finds himself and his happi- 
ness. Slavery is the most degrading condition 
of which he is capable, and he is as often a 
slave to the niggardness of the earth and the 
inclemency of heaven, as to a master or an insti- 
tution. He is a slave when all his energy is 
spent in avoiding suffering and death, wheu all 
his action is imposed from without, and no 



tS THE SENS! OF BEAUTY 

breath or strength is left him for free enjoy* 
ment. 

Work and play here take on a different mean- 
ing, and become equivalent to servitude and free- 
dom. The change consists in the subjective point 
of view from which the distinction is now made. 
We no longer mean by work all that is done 
usefully, but only what is done unwillingly and 
by the spur of necessity. By play we are des- 
ignating, no longer what is done fruitlessly! but 
whatever is done spontaneously and for its own 
sake, whether it have or not an ulterior utility. 
Play, in this sense, may be our most useful occu- 
pation. So far would a gradual adaptation to the 
environment be from making this play obsolete, 
that it would tend to abolish work, and to make 
play universal. For with the elimination of all 
the conflicts and errors of instinct, the race would 
do spontaneously whatever conduced to its welfare 
and we shonld live safely and prosperously with- 
out external stimulus or restraint. 



Mttmkmmn § 6. In this second and subjective 
9mamm sense, then, work is the disparaging 



term and play the eulogistic one. All 
who feel the dignify and importance of the things 
of the imagination, need not hesitate to adopt the 
classification which designates them as play. We 
point out thereby, not that they have no value, but 
that their value is intrinsic, that in them is one of 
the sources of all worth. Evidently all values 
must be ultimately intrinsic The useful is good 



THE NATURE OF BEAUTY 29 

because of the excellence of its consequences; but 
these must somewhere cease to be merely useful 
in their turn, or only excellent as means; some- 
where we must reach the good that is good in 
itself and for its own sake, else the whole process 
is futile, and the utility of our first object illusory. 
We here reach the second factor in our distinction, 
between aesthetic and moral values, which regards 
their immediacy. 

If we attempt to remove from life all its evils, 
as the popular imagination has done at times, we 
shall find little but aesthetic pleasures remaining 
to constitute unalloyed happiness. The satisfac- 
tion of the passions and the appetites, in which 
we chiefly place earthly happiness, themselves 
take on an aesthetic tinge when we remove ideally 
the possibility of loss or variation. What could 
the Olympians honour in one another or the sera- 
phim worship in God except the embodiment of 
eternal attributes, of essences which, like beauty, 
make us happy only in contemplation? The glory 
of heaven could not be otherwise symbolized than 
by light and music. Even the knowledge of truth, 
which the most sober theologians made the essence 
of the beatific vision, is an aesthetic delight; for 
when the truth has no further practical utility, it 
becomes a landscape. The delight of it is imagi- 
native and the value of it aesthetic. 

This reduction of all values to immediate ap- 
preciations, to sensuous or vital activities, is so 
inevitable that it has struck even the minds most 
courageously rationalistic. Only for them, instead 



30 THE SENSE OF BEAUTY 

of leading to the liberation of assthetic goods from 
practical entanglements and their establishment as 
the only pore and positive values in life, this 
analysis has led rather to the denial of all pore and 
positive goods altogether. Such thinkers naturally 
assume that moral values are intrinsic and supreme ; 
and since these moral values would not arise but for 
the existence or imminence of physical evils, they 
embrace the paradox that without evil no good 
whatever is conceivable. 

The harsh requirements of apologetics have no 
doubt helped them to this position, from which 
one breath of spring or the sight of one well- 
begotten creature should be enough to dislodge 
them. Their ethical temper and the fetters of 
their imagination forbid them to reconsider their 
original assumption and to conceive that morality 
is a means and not an end; that it is the price 
of human non-adaptation, and the consequence of 
the original sin of unfitness. It is the compres- 
sion of human conduct within the narrow limits 
of the safe and possible. Remove danger, remove 
pain, remove the occasion of pity, and the need of 
morality is gone. To say "thou shalt not" would 
then be an impertinence. 

But this elimination of precept would not be a 
cessation of life. The senses would still be open, 
the instincts would still operate, and lead all creat- 
ures to the haunts and occupations that befitted 
them. The variety of nature and the infinity of 
art, with the companionship of our fellows, would 
fill the leisure of that ideal existence. These are 



THE NATUBE OF BEAUTY 31 

the elements of our positive happiness, the things 
which, amid a thousand vexations and vanities, 
make the clear profit of living. 

§ 8. Not only are the various satis- ***A*fo ••»- 
factions which morals are meant to wniprin- 
secure aesthetic in the last analysis, ******' 
but when the conscience is formed, and right 
principles acquire an immediate authority, our 
attitude to these principles becomes aesthetic 
also. Honour, truthfulness, and cleanliness are 
obvious examples. When the absence of these 
virtues causes an instinctive disgust, as it does 
in well-bred people, the reaction is essentially 
aesthetic, because it is not based on reflection and 
benevolence, but on constitutional sensitiveness. 
This SBSthetic sensitiveness is, however, properly 
enough called moral, because it is the effect of 
conscientious training and is more powerful for 
good in society than laborious virtue, because 
it is much more constant and catching. It is 
KaXoK&yaBui, the aesthetic demand for the morally 
good, and perhaps the finest flower of human 
nature. 

But this tendency of representative principles 
to become independent powers and acquire in- 
trinsic value is sometimes mischievous. It is the 
foundation of the conflicts between sentiment and 
justice, between intuitive and utilitarian morals. 
Every human reform is the reassertion of the pri- 
mary interests of man against the authority of 
general principles which have ceased to represent 



32 THE SENSE OF BEAUTY 

those interests fairly, but which still obtain the 
idolatrous veneration of mankind. Nor are chiv- 
alry and religion alone liable to fall into this moral 
superstition. It arises wherever an abstract good 
is substituted for its concrete equivalent. The 
miser's fallacy is the typical case, and something 
very like it is the ethical principle of half our 
respectable population. To the exercise of certain 
useful habits men come to sacrifice the advantage 
which was the original basis and justification of 
those habits. Minute knowledge is pursued at 
the expense of largeness of mind, and riches at 
the expense of comfort and freedom. 

This error is all the more specious when the 
derived aim has in itself some aesthetic charm, 
such as belongs to the Stoic idea of playing one's . 
part in a vast drama of things, irrespective of any 
advantage thereby accruing to any one; some- 
what as the miser's passion is rendered a little 
normal when his eye is fascinated not merely 
by the figures of a bank account, but by the 
glitter of the yellow gold. And the vanity of 
playing a tragic part and the glory of conscious 
self-sacrifice have the same immediate fascina- 
tion. Many irrational maxims thus acquire a 
kind of nobility. An object is chosen as the 
highest good which has not only a certain repre- 
sentative value, but also an intrinsic one, — whioh 
is not merely a method for the realization of 
other values, but a value in its own realization. 

Obedience to God is for the Christian, as con- 
formity to the laws of nature or reason is for 



THE NATURE OF BEAUTY 38 

the Stoic, an attitude which has a certain emo- 
tional and passionate worth, apart from its 
original justification by maxims of utility. This 
emotional and passionate force is the essence of 
fanaticism, it makes imperatives categorical, and 
gives them absolute sway over the conscience in 
spite of their one-sidedness and their injustice 
to the manifold demands of human nature. 

Obedience to God or reason can originally 
recommend itself to a man only as the surest 
and ultimately least painful way of balancing 
his aims and synthesizing his desires. So neces- 
sary is this sanction even to the most impetuous 
natures, that no martyr would go to the stake if 
he did not believe that the powers of nature, in 
the day of judgment, would be on his side. But 
the human mind is a turbulent commonwealth, 
and the laws that make for the greatest good 
cannot be established in it without some partial 
sacrifice, without the suppression of many par- 
ticular impulses. Hence the voice of reason or 
the command of God, which makes for the maxi- 
mum ultimate satisfaction, finds itself opposed 
by sundry scattered and refractory forces, which 
are henceforth denominated bad. The unreflec- 
tive conscience, forgetting the vicarious source 
of its own excellence, then assumes a solemn 
and incomprehensible immediacy, as if its decrees 
were absolute and intrinsically authoritative, not 
of to-day or yesterday, and no one could tell 
whence they had arisen. Instinct' can all the 
more easily produce this mystification when it 



34 THE SENSE OF BEAUTY 

calls forth an imaginative activity foil of interest 
and eager passion. This effect is conspicuous in 
the absolutist conscience, both devotional and 
rationalistic, as also 4n the passion of love. For 
in all these a certain individuality! definiteness, 
and exclusiveness is given to the pursued object 
which is very favourable to zeal, and the heat 
of passion melts together the various processes 
of volition into the consciousness of one adorable 
influence. 

However deceptive these complications may 
prove to men of action and eloquence, they ought 
not to impose on the critic of human nature. 
Evidently what value general goods do not derive 
from the particular satisfactions they stand for, 
they possess in themselves as ideas pleasing and 
powerful over the imagination. This intrinsic 
advantage of certain principles and methods is 
none the less real for being in a sense aesthetic. 
Only a sordid utilitarianism that subtracts the 
imagination from human nature, or at least slurs 
over its immense contribution to our happiness, 
could fail to give these principles the preference 
over others practically as good. 

If it could be shown, for instance, that monarchy 
was as apt, in a given case, to secure the public 
well-being as some other form of government, mon- 
archy should be preferred, and would undoubtedly 
be established, on account of its imaginative and 
dramatic superiority. But if, blinded by this 
somewhat ethereal advantage, a party sacrificed 
to it important public interests, the injustice 



THE NATURE OF BEAUTY 35 

would be manifest. In a doubtful case, a nation 
decides, not without painful conflicts, how much 
it will sacrifice to its sentimental needs. The 
important point is to remember that the repre- 
sentative or practical value of a principle is one 
thing, and its intrinsic or aesthetic value is 
another, and that the latter can be justly counted 
only as an item in its favour to be weighed 
against possible external disadvantages. When- 
ever this comparison and balancing of ultimate 
benefits of every kind is angrily dismissed in 
favour of some absolute principle, laid down in 
contempt of human misery and happiness, we have 
a personal and fantastic system of ethics, without 
practical sanctions. It is an evidence that the 
superstitious imagination has invaded the sober 
and practical domain of morals. 

§7. We have now separated with *«**•** 
some care intellectual and moral judg- piiLun. 
ments from the sphere of our subject, 
and found that wo are to deal only with percep- 
tions of value, and with these only when they 
are positive and immediate. But even with 
these distinctions the most remarkable charac- 
teristic of the sense of beauty remains undefined. 
All pleasures are intrinsic and positive values, 
but all pleasures are not perceptions of beauty. 
Pleasure is indeed the essence of that perception, 
but there is evidently in this particular pleasure 
a complication which is not present in others 
and which is the basis of the distinction made 



96 THB SENSE OF BEAUTY 

by consciousness and language between it and 
the rest. It will be instructive to notice the 
degrees of this difference. 

The bodily pleasures are those least resembling 
perceptions of beauty. By bodily pleasures we 
mean, of course! more than pleasures with a 
bodily seat; for that class would include them 
all, as well as all forms and elements of con- 
sciousness. ./Esthetic pleasures have physical 
conditions 9 they depend on the activity of the 
eye and the ear, of the memory and the other 
ideational functions of the brain. But we do not 
connect those pleasures with their seats except in 
physiological studies; the ideas with which cbs- 
thetic pleasures are associated are not the ideas 
of their bodily causes. The pleasures we call 
physical, and regard as low, on the contrary, are 
those which call our attention to some part of 
our own body, and which make no object so 
conspicuous to us as the organ in which they 
arise. 

There is here, then, a very marked distinc- 
tion between physical and aesthetic pleasure; the 
organs of the latter must be transparent, they 
must not intercept our attention, but carry it 
directly to some external object. The greater 
dignity and range of aesthetic pleasure is thus 
made very intelligible. The soul is glad, as it 
were, to forget its connexion with the body and 
to fancy that it can travel over the world with 
the liberty with which it changes the objects of 
its thought. The mind passes from China to 



THE NATURE OF BEAUTY 37 

Peru without any conscious change in the local 
tensions of the body. This illusion of disem- 
bodiment is very exhilarating, while immersion 
in the flesh and confinement to some organ gives 
a tone of grossness and selfishness to our con* 
sciousness. The generally meaner associations of 
physical pleasures also help to explain their com- 
parative crudity. 



' J 8. The distinction between pleas- **•< 
ure and the sense of beauty has some- %££!?%* 
times been said to consist in the «s •****»■■*■ 
unselfishness of aesthetic satisfaction. 
In other pleasures, it is said, we gratify our 
senses and passions; in the contemplation of 
beauty we are raised above ourselves, the pas- 
sions are silenced and we are happy in the 
recognition of a good that we do not seek to 
possess. The painter does not look at a spring 
of water with the eyes of a thirsty man, nor at 
a beautiful woman with those of a satyr. The 
difference lies, it is urged, in the impersonality 
of the enjoyment. But this distinction is one of 
intensity and delicacy, not of nature, and it seems 
satisfactory only to the least aesthetic minds. 1 

l Schopenhauer, indeed, who makes much of it, was a food 
critic, bat his psychology suffered much from the pessimistic 
generalities of his system. It concerned him to show that the 
wUl was bad, and, as he felt beauty to be a good if not a holy 
thing, he hastened to convince himself that it came from the 
suppression of the will. Bat even in his system this suppres- 
sion is only relative. The desire of individual objects, indeed, 
is abeent in the perception of beauty, but there is stUl present 



38 THE 8SN8B OF BEAUTY 

In the second place, the supposed disinterested- 
ness of aesthetic delights is not truly fundamental. 
Appreciation of a picture is not identical with the 
desire to buy it, but it is, or ought to be, closely 
related and preliminary to that desire. The 
beauties of nature and of the plastic arts are 
not consumed by being enjoyed; they retain all 
the efficacy to impress a second beholder. But 
this circumstance is accidental, and those aesthetic 
objects which depend upon change and are ex- 
hausted in time, as are all performances, are 
things the enjoyment of which is an object of 
rivalry and is coveted as much as any other 
pleasure. And even plastic beauties can often 
not be enjoyed except by a few, on account of 
the necessity of travel or other difficulties of 
access, and then this aesthetic enjoyment is as 
selfishly pursued as the rest. 

The truth which the theory is trying to state 
seems rather to be that when we seek aesthetic 
pleasures we have no further pleasure in mind; 
that we do not mix up the satisfactions of vanity 
and proprietorship with the delight of contempla- 
tion. This is true, but it is true at bottom of 

that initial love of the general type and principles of things which 
is the first illusion of the absolute, and drives it on to the fatal 
experiment of creation. So that, apart from Schopenhauer's 
mythology, we have even in him the recognition that beauty 
gives satisfaction to some dim and underlying demand of our 
nature, just as particular objects give more special and momen- 
tary pleasures to our individualized wills. His psychology was, 
however, far too vague and general to undertake an analysis of 
those mysterious feelings. 



THM NATUBB OF BEAUTY 99 

all pursuits and enjoyments. Every real pleasure 
is in one sense disinterested. It is not sought 
with ulterior motives, and what fills the mind 
is no calculation, but the image of an object or 
event, suffused with emotion. A sophisticated 
consciousness may often take the idea of self as 
the touchstone of its inclinations; but this self, 
for the gratification and aggrandizement of which 
a man may live, is itself only a complex of 
aims and memories, which once had their direct 
objects, in which he had taken a spontaneous 
and unselfish interest. The gratifications which, 
merged together, make the selfishness are each 
of them ingenuous, and no more selfish than the 
most altruistic, impersonal emotion. The content 
of selfishness is a mass of unselfishness. There 
is no reference to the nominal essence called one- 
self either in one's appetites or in one's natural 
affections; yet a man absorbed in his meat and 
drink, in his houses and lands, in his children 
and dogs, is called selfish because these interests, 
although natural and instinctive in him, are not 
shared by others. The unselfish man is he whose 
nature has a more universal direction, whose in* 
terests are more widely diffused. 

But as impersonal thoughts are such only in 
their object, not in their subject or agent, since 
all thoughts are the thoughts of somebody: so 
also unselfish interests have to be somebody's 
interests. If we were not interested in beauty, 
if it were of no concern to our happiness whether 
things were beautiful or ugly, we should mani* 



40 THE SENSE OF BEAUTY 

fest not the maximum, but the total atoenoe of 
aesthetic faculty. The disinterestedness of this 
pleasure is, therefore, that of all primitive and 
intuitive satisfactions, which are in no way con- 
ditioned by a reference to an artificial general 
concept, like that of the self, all the potency of 
which must itself be derived from the indepen- 
dent energy of its component elements. I care 
about myself because "myself" is a name for the 
things I have at heart. To set up the verbal 
figment of personality and make it an object of 
concern apart from the interests which were its 
content and substance, turns the moralist into 
a pedant, and ethics into a superstition. The 
self which is the object of amour propre is an 
idol of the tribe, and needs to be disintegrated 
into the primitive objective interests that under- 
lie it before the cultus of it can be justified by 
reason. 

Tin dftmwrtfm §9. The supposed disinterestedness 
^SmrtAot °f ° ur l° v © °* beauty passes into an- 
ftt iM/Mra«f- other characteristic of it often regarded 
as essential, — its universality* The 
pleasures of the senses have, it is said, no dogma- 
tism in them; that anything gives me pleasure 
involves no assertion about its capacity to give 
pleasure to another. But when I judge a thing to 
be beautiful, my judgment means that the thing 
is beautiful in itself, or (what is the same thing 
more critically expressed) that it should seem so 
to everybody. The claim to universality is, ac- 



THB NATURE OF BEAUTY 41 

oording to this doctrine, the essence of the aes- 
thetic; what makes the perception of beauty a 
judgment rattier than a sensation. All aesthetic 
precepts would be impossible, and all criticism 
arbitrary and subjective, unless we admit a para- 
doxical universality in our judgment, the philo- 
sophical implications of which we may then go 
on to develope. But we are fortunately not re- 
quired to enter the labyrinth into which this 
method leads; there is a much simpler and clearer 
way of studying such questions, which is to chal- 
lenge and analyze the assertion before us and seek 
its basis in human nature. Before this is done, 
we should run the risk of expanding a natural 
misconception or inaccuracy of thought into an 
inveterate and pernicious prejudice by making it 
the centre of an elaborate construction* 

That the claim of universality is such a natural 
inaccuracy will not be hard to show. There is 
notoriously no great agreement upon aesthetic 
matters; and such agreement as there is, is based 
upon similarity of origin, nature, and circumstance 
among men, a similarity which, where it exists, 
tends to bring about identity in all judgments and 
feelings. It is unmeaning to say that what is 
beautiful to one man ought to be beautiful to 
another. If their senses are the same, their asso- 
ciations and dispositions similar, then the same 
thing will certainly be beautiful to both. If their 
natures are different, the form which to one will 
be entrancing will be to another even invisible, 
because his classifications and discriminations in 



42 THE SENSE OF BEAUTY 

perception will be different, and he may see a hid* 
eous detached fragment or a shapeless aggregate of 
things, in what to another is a perfect whole — so 
entirely are the unities of objects unities of func- 
tion and use. It is absurd to say that what is 
invisible to a given being ought to seem beautiful 
to him. Evidently this obligation of recognizing 
the same qualities is conditioned by the possession 
of the same faculties. But no two men have 
exactly the same faculties, nor can things have 
for any two exactly the same values. 

What is loosely expressed by saying that any 
one ought to see this or that beauty is that he 
would see it if his disposition, training, or atten- 
tion were what our ideal demands for him; and 
our ideal of what any one should be has complex 
but discoverable sources. We take, for instance, 
a certain pleasure in having our own judgments 
supported by those of others; we are intolerant, 
if not of the existence of a nature different from 
our own, at least of its expression in words and 
judgments. We are confirmed or made happy in 
our doubtful opinions by seeing them accepted 
universally. We are unable to find the basis of 
our taste in our own experience and therefore 
refuse to look for it there. If we were sure of 
our ground, we should be willing to acquiesce in 
the naturally different feelings and ways of others, 
as a man who is conscious of speaking his lan- 
guage with the accent of the capital confesses its 
arbitrariness with gayety, and is pleased and in- 
terested in the variations of it he observes in pro- 



THB NATURE OF BEAUTY 43 

vincials; but the provincial is always zealous to 
show that he has reason and ancient authority to 
justify his oddities. So people who have no sen- 
sations, and do not know why they judge, are 
always trying to show that they judge by uni- 
versal reason. 

Thus the frailty and superficiality of our own 
judgments cannot brook contradiction. We abhor 
another man's doubt when we cannot tell him 
why we ourselves believe. Our ideal of other 
men tends therefore to include the agreement of 
their judgments with our own; and although we 
might acknowledge the fatuity of this demand in 
regard to natures very different from the human, 
we may be unreasonable enough to require that 
all races should admire the same style of archi- 
tecture, and all ages the same poets. 

The great actual unity of human taste within 
the range of conventional history helps the pre- 
tension. But in principle it is untenable. Noth- 
ing has less to do with the real merit of a work of 
imagination than the capacity of all men to appre- 
ciate it; the true test is the degree and kind of 
satisfaction it can give to him who appreciates 
it most. The symphony would lose nothing if 
half mankind had always been deaf, as nine- 
tenths of them actually are to the intricacies of 
its harmonies; but it would have lost much if 
no Beethoven had existed. And more : incapacity 
to appreciate certain types of beauty may be the 
condition sine qua non for the appreciation of 
another kind; the greatest capacity both for en* 



44 THE SENSE OF BEAUTY 

joyment and creation is highly specialized and 
exclusiye^ and hence the greatest ages of art have 
often been strangely intolerant. 

The invectives of one school against another, per- 
verse as they are philosophically, are artistically 
often signs of health, because they indicate a vital 
appreciation of certain kinds of beauty, a love of 
them that has grown into a jealous, passion. The 
architects that have pieced out the imperfections 
of ancient buildings with their own thoughts, like 
Charles V. when he raised his massive palace 
beside the Alhambra, may be condemned from a 
certain point of view. They marred much by 
their interference; but they showed a splendid 
confidence in their own intuitions, a proud asser- 
tion of their own taste, which is the greatest evi- 
dence of aesthetic sincerity. On the contrary, our 
own gropings, eclecticism, and archaeology are the 
symptoms of impotence. If we were less learned 
and less just, we might be more efficient. If our 
appreciation were less general, it might be more 
real, and if we trained our imagination into exolu- 
siveness, it might attain to character. 

Tk€ d&krvrta § 1Q, There is, however, something 
•/ *tt* niore in the claim to universality in 



oq^ctyhation. gesthetip judgments than the desire to 
generalize our own opinions. There is the ex- 
pression of a curious but well-known psychologi- 
cal phenomenon, viz., the transformation of an 
element of sensation into the quality of a thing. 
If we say that other men should see the beauties 



THE NATUBS OF BEAUTY 45 

we see, it is because we think those beauties art 
in the object, like its colour, proportion, or size. 
Our judgment appears to us merely the percep- 
tion and discovery of an external existence, of the 
real excellence that is without. But this notion 
is radically absurd and contradictory. Beauty, as 
we have seen, is a value; it cannot be conceived as 
an independent existence which affects our senses 
and which we consequently perceive. It exists in 
perception, and cannot exist otherwise. A beauty 
not perceived is a pleasure not felt, and a contra- 
diction. But modern philosophy has taught us to 
say the same thing of every element of the per- 
ceived world; all are sensations; and their group- 
ing into objects imagined to be permanent and 
external is the work of certain habits of our intel- 
ligence. We should be incapable of surveying or 
retaining the diffused experiences of life, unless 
we organized and classified them, and out of the 
chaos of impressions framed the world of conven- 
tional and recognizable objects. 

How this is done is explained by the current 
theories of perception. External objects usually 
affect various senses at once, the impressions of 
which are thereby associated. Repeated experi- 
ences of one object are also associated on account 
of their similarity; hence a double tendency to 
merge and unify into a single percept, to which 
a name is attached, the group of those memories 
and reactions which in fact had one external thing 
for their cause. But this percept, once formed, is 
clearly different from those particular experiences 



46 THE SENSE OF BEAUTY 

out of which it grew. It is permanent, they are 
variable. They are but partial views and glimpses 
of it. The constituted notion therefore comes to 
be the reality, and the materials of it merely the 
appearance. The distinction between substance 
and quality, reality and appearance, matter and 
mind, has no other origin. 

The objects thus conceived and distinguished 
from our ideas of them, are at first compacted 
of all the impressions, feelings, and memories, 
which offer themselves for association and fall 
within the vortex of the amalgamating imagi- 
nation. Every sensation we get from a thing is 
originally treated as one of its qualities. Experi- 
ment, however, and the practical need of a simpler 
conception of the structure of objects lead us grad- 
ually to reduce the qualities of the object to a 
minimum, and to regard most perceptions as an 
effect of those few qualities upon us. These few 
primary qualities, like extension which we persist 
in treating as independently real and as the qual- 
ity of a substance, are those which suffice to 
explain the order of our experiences. All the 
rest, like colour, are relegated to the subjective 
sphere, as merely effects upon our minds, and 
apparent or secondary qualities of the object. 

But this distinction has only a practical justifica- 
tion. Convenience and economy of thought alone 
determine what combination of our sensations we 
shall continue to objectify and treat as the cause of 
the rest. The right and tendency to be objective 
is equal in all, since they are all prior to the arti- 



IHfc NATURE OF BEAUTY 4f 

fice of thought by which we separate the concept 
from its materials, the thing from our experiences. 

The qualities which we now conceive to belong 
to real objects are for the most part images of 
sight and touch. One of the first classes of effects 
to be treated as secondary were naturally pleasures 
and pains, since it could commonly conduce very 
little to intelligent and successful action to con- 
ceive our pleasures and pains as resident in objects. 
But emotions are essentially capable of objectifica- 
tion, as well as impressions of sense; and one may 
well believe that a primitive and inexperienced 
consciousness would rather people the world with 
ghosts of its own terrors and passions than with 
projections of those luminous and mathematical 
concepts which as yet it could hardly have formed. 

This animistic and mythological habit of thought 
still holds its own at the confines of knowledge, 
where mechanical explanations are not found. In 
ourselves, where nearness makes observation diffi- 
cult, in the intricate chaos of animal and human 
life, we still appeal to the efficacy of will and 
ideas, as also in the remote night of cosmic and 
religious problems. But in all the intermediate 
realm of vulgar day, where mechanical science has 
made progress, the inclusion of emotional or pas- 
sionate elements in the concept of the reality 
would be now an extravagance. Here our idea 
of things is composed exclusively of perceptual 
elements, of the ideas of form and of motion. 

The beauty of objects, however, forms an ex- 
ception to this rule. Beauty is an emotional ale- 



48 THE SENSE OF BEAUTY 

ment, a pleasure of ours, which nevertheless we 
regard as a quality of things. But we are now 
prepared to understand the nature of this excep- 
tion. It is the survival of a tendency originally 
universal to make every effect of a thing upon us 
a constituent of its conceived nature. The scien- 
tific idea of a thing is a great abstraction from the 
mass of perceptions and reactions which that thing 
produces; the aesthetic idea is less abstract, since 
it retains the emotional reaction, the pleasure of 
the perception, as an integral part of the conceived 
thing. 

Nor is it hard to find the ground of this survival 
in the sense of beauty of an objectification of feel- 
ing elsewhere extinct. Most of the pleasures which 
objects cause are easily distinguished and separated 
from the perception of the object: the object has to 
be applied to a particular organ, like the palate, 
or swallowed like wine, or used and operated upon 
in some way before the pleasure arises. The cohe- 
sion is therefore slight between the pleasure and 
the other associated elements of sense; the pleas- 
ure is separated in time from the perception, or 
it is localized in a different organ, and conse- 
quently is at once recognized as an effect and 
not as a quality of the object. But when the 
process of perception itself is pleasant, as it may 
easily be, when the intellectual operation, by 
which the elements of sense are associated and 
projected, and the concept of the form and sub- 
stance of the thing produced, is naturally delight- 
ful, then we have a pleasure intimately bound up 



THE NATURE OF BEAUTY 49 

in the thing, inseparable from its character and 
constitution, the seat of which in us is the same 
as the seat of the perception. We naturally fail, 
under these circumstances, to separate the pleasure 
from the other objectified feelings. It becomes, 
like them, a quality of the object, which we distin- 
guish from pleasures not so incorporated in the 
perception of things, by giving it the name of 
beauty. 

§ 11. We have now reached our defi- »•***»■» 
nition of beauty, which, in the terms 
of our successive analysis and narrowing of the 
conception, is value positive, intrinsic, and objec- 
tified. Or, in less technical language, Beauty is 
pleasure regarded as the quality of a thing. 

This definition is intended to sum up a variety 
of distinctions and identifications which should 
perhaps be here more explicitly set down. 
Beauty is a value, that is, it is not a peroep* 
tion of a matter of fact or of a relation: it is 
an emotion, an affection of our volitional and 
appreciative nature. An object cannot be beau- 
tiful if it can give pleasure to nobody: a beauty 
to which all men were forever indifferent is a 
contradiction in terms. 

In the second place, this value is positive, it is the 
sense of the presence of something good, or (in the 
case of ugliness) of its absence. It is never the per- 
ception of a positive evil, it is never a negative 
value. That we are endowed with the sense of 
beauty is a pure gain which brings no evil with it. 



ISO THE SENSE OF BEAUTY 

When the ugly ceases to be amusing or merely Un- 
interesting and becomes disgusting, it becomes in- 
deed a positive evil: but a moral and practical, 
not an aesthetic one. In aesthetics that saying is 
true — often so disingenuous in ethics — that evil 
is nothing but the absence of good: for even the 
tedium and vulgarity of an existence without 
beauty is not itself ugly so much as lamentable 
and degrading. The absence of aesthetic goods 
is a moral evil : the aesthetic evil is merely rela- 
tive, and means less of aesthetic good than was 
expected at the place and time. No form in 
itself gives pain, although some forms give pain 
by causing a shock of surprise even when they 
are really beautiful: as if a mother found a fine 
bull pup in her child's cradle, when her pain 
would not be aesthetic in its nature. 

Further, this pleasure must not be in the conse- 
quence of the utility of the object or event, but in 
its immediate perception; in other words, beauty 
is an ultimate good, something that gives satis- 
faction to a natural function, to some funda- 
mental need or capacity of our minds. Beauty is 
therefore a positive value that is intrinsic; it is 
a pleasure. These two circumstances sufficiently 
separate the sphere of aesthetics from that of 
ethics. Moral values are generally negative, and 
always remote. Morality has to do with the 
avoidance of evil and the pursuit of good: 
aesthetics only with enjoyment. 

Finally, the pleasures of sense are distinguished 
from the perception of beauty, as sensation in 



THE NATURE OF BEAUTY 51 

general is distinguished from perception; by the 
objeotifioation of the elements and their ap- 
pearance as qualities rather of things than of 
consciousness. The passage from sensation to 
perception is gradual, and the path may be 
sometimes retraced: so it is with beauty and 
the pleasures of sensation. There is no sharp 
line between them, but it depends upon the 
degree of objectivity my feeling has attained at 
the moment whether I say "It pleases me," or 
"It is beautiful." If I am self-conscious and 
critical, I shall probably use one phrase; if I 
am impulsive and susceptible, the other. The 
more remote, interwoven, and inextricable the 
pleasure is, the more objective it will appear; 
and the union of two pleasures often makes one 
beauty. In Shakespeare's LIVth sonnet are these 
words: 

O how much more doth beauty beauteous seem 

By that sweet ornament which truth doth give ! 

The rose looks fair, but fairer we it deem 

For that sweet odour which doth in it live. 

The canker-blooms have fall as deep a dye 

As the perfumed tincture of the roses, 

Hang on such thorns, and play as wantonly 

When summer's breath their masked buds discloses. 

But, for their beauty only is their show, 

They live unwooed and unrespected fade ; 

Die to themselves. Sweet roses do not so : 

Of their sweet deaths are sweetest odours made. 

One added ornament, we see, turns the deep 
dye, which was but show and mere sensation 



SENSE OF BEAUTY 

before, into an element of beauty and reality; 
and as truth is here the co-operation of percep- 
tions, so beauty is the co-operation of pleasures. 
If colour, form, and motion are hardly beautiful 
without the sweetness of the odour, how much 
more necessary would they be for the sweetness 
itself to become a beauty! If we had the per- 
fume in a flask, no one would think of calling 
it beautiful: it would give us too detached and 
controllable a sensation. There would be no 
object in which it could be easily incorporated. 
But let it float from the garden, and it will add 
another sensuous charm to objects simultaneously 
recognized, and help to make them beautiful, 
rlrhus beauty is constituted by the objectification 
• of pleasure* It is pleasure objectified. 



part n 

THE MATERIALS OF BEAUTY 

S 12. Our task will now be to pass Aiikimm 
in review the various elements of our ^112*^ aT* 
consciousness, and see what each con- **••*»•• »f 
tributes to the beauty of the world. 
We shall find that they do so whenever they are 
inextricably associated with the objectifying activ- 
ity of the understanding. Whenever the golden 
thread of pleasure enters that web of things which 
our intelligence is always busily spinning, it lends 
to the visible world that mysterious and subtle 
charm which we call beauty. 

There is no function of our nature which can- 
not contribute something to this effect, but one 
function differs very much from another in the 
amount and directness of its contribution. The 
pleasures of the eye and ear, of the imagina- 
tion and memory, are the most easily objecti- 
fied and merged in ideas; but it would betray 
inexcusable haste and slight appreciation of the 
principle involved, if we called them the only 
materials of beauty. Our effort will rather be 
to discover its other sources, which have been 
more generally ignored, and point out their im- 
portance. For the five senses and the three 
63 



64 THE SENSE 07 BEAUTY 

powers of the soul! which play so large a part 
in traditional psychology, are by no means the 
only sources or factors of consciousness; they are 
more or less external divisions of its content, and 
not even exhaustive of that. The nature and 
changes of our life have deeper roots, and are 
controlled by less obvious processes. 

The human body is a machine that holds 
together by virtue of certain vital functions, on 
the cessation of which it is dissolved. Some of 
';hese 9 like the circulation of the blood, the 
growth and decay of the tissues, are at first 
sight unconscious. Yet any important disturb- 
ance of these fundamental processes at once pro- 
duces great and painful changes in consciousness. 
Slight alterations are not without their conscious 
echo: and the whole temper and tone of our 
mind, the strength of our passions, the grip and 
concatenation of our habits, our power of atten- 
tion, and the liveliness of our fancy and affec- 
tions are due to the influence of these vital forces. 
They do not, perhaps, constitute the whole basis 
of any one idea or emotion: but they are the con- 
ditions of the existence and character of all. 

Particularly important are they for the value of 
our experience. They constitute health, without 
which no pleasure can be pure. They determine 
our impulses in leisure, and furnish that surplus 
energy which we spend in play, in art, and in 
speculation. The attraction of these pursuits, and 
the very existence of an asthetic sphere, is due 
to the efficiency and perfection of our vital pro- 



THB MATERIALS OF BEAUTY 66 

The pleasures which they involve are not 
exclusively bound to any particular object, and 
therefore do not account for the relative beauty 
of things. They are loose and unlocalized, hav- 
ing no special organ, or one which is internal and 
hidden within the body. They therefore remain 
undiscriminated in consciousness, and can serve 
to add interest to any object, or to cast a gen- 
eral glamour over the world, very favourable to 
its interest and beauty. 

The aesthetio value of vital functions differs 
according to their physiological concomitants: 
those that are favourable to ideation are of 
course more apt to extend something of their 
intimate warmth to the pleasures of contempla- 
tion, and thus to intensify the sense of beauty 
and the interest of thought. Those, on the other 
hand, that for physiological reasons tend to 
inhibit ideation, and to drown the attention in 
dumb and unrepresentable feelings, are less fa- 
vourable to aesthetic activity. The double effect 
of drowsiness and reverie will illustrate this 
difference.^ The heaviness of sleep seems to fall 
first on the outer senses, and of course makes 
them incapable of acute impressions; but if it 
goes no further, it leaves the imagination all the 
freer, and by heightening the colours of the fancy, 
often suggests and reveals beautiful images. 
There is a kind of poetry and invention that 
comes only in such moments. In them many 
lovely melodies must first have been heard, and 
centaurs and angels originally imagined. 



66 THE SENSE OF BEAUTY 

If, however, the lethargy is more complete, or if 
the cause of it is such that the imagination is re- 
tarded while the senses remain awake, — as is the 
case with an over-fed or over-exercised body, — we 
have a state of aesthetic insensibility. The exhil- 
aration which comes with pure and refreshing air 
has a marked influence on our appreciations. 
To it is largely due the beauty of the morning, 
and the entirely different charm it has from the 
evening. The opposite state of all the functions 
here adds an opposite embtion to externally simi- 
lar scenes, making both infinitely but differently 
beautiful. 

It would be curious and probably surprising to 
discover how much the pleasure of breathing has 
to do with our highest and most transcendental 
ideals. It is not merely a metaphor that makes 
us couple airiness with exquisiteness and breath- 
lessness with awe; it is the actual recurrence of a 
sensation in the throat and lungs that gives those 
impressions an immediate power, prior to all re- 
flection upon their significance. It is, therefore, 
to this vital sensation of deep or arrested respi- 
ration that the impressiveness of those objects is 
immediately due. 

ih%infiut*f § 13, Half-way between vital and 
IftoZf"** 1 *" social functions, lies the sexual in- 
stinct. If nature had solved the prob- 
lem of reproduction without the differentiation of 
sex, our emotional life would have been radically 
different. So profound and, especially in woman, 



THE MATERIALS OF BEAUTY 5T 

so pervasive an influence does this function exert, 
that we should betray an entirely unreal view of 
human nature if we did not inquire into the 
relations of sex with our aesthetic susceptibility. 
We must not expect, however, any great differ- 
ence between man and woman in the scope or 
objects of aesthetic interest: what is important 
in emotional life is not which sex an animal has, 
but that it has sex at all. For if we consider the 
difficult problem which nature had to solve in 
sexual reproduction, and the nice adjustment of 
instinct which it demands, we shall see that the 
reactions and susceptibilities which must be 
implanted in the individual are for the most 
part identical in both sexes, as the sexual organi- 
zation is itself fundamentally similar in both. 
Indeed, individuals of various species and the 
whole animal kingdom have the same sexual dis- 
position, although, of course, the particular object 
destined to call forth the complete sexual reaction, 
differs with every species, and with each sex. 

If we were dealing with the philosophy of love, 
and not with that of beauty, our problem would 
be to find out by what machinery this fundamen- 
tal susceptibility, common to all animals of both 
sexes, is gradually directed to more and more 
definite objects : first, to one species and one sex, 
and ultimately to one individual. It is not 
enough that sexual organs should be differenti- 
ated: the connexion must be established between 
them and the outer senses, so that the animal 
may recognize and pursue the proper object. 



68 THE SENSE OF BEAUTY 

The case of lifelong fidelity to one mate — perhaps 
even to an unsatisfied and hopeless love — is the 
maximum of differentiation, which even overleaps 
the utility which gave it a foothold in nature, and 
defeats its own object. For the differentiation 
of the instinct in respect to sex, age, and species 
is obviously necessary to its success as a device 
for reproduction. While this differentiation is 
not complete, — and it often is not, — there is a 
great deal of groping and waste; and the force 
and constancy of the instinct must make up for 
its lack of precision. A great deal of vital energy 
is thus absorbed by this ill-adjusted function. 
The most economical arrangement which can be 
conceived, would be one by which only the one 
female best fitted to bear offspring to a male 
should arouse his desire, and only so many times 
as it was well she should grow pregnant, thus 
leaving his energy and attention free at all other 
times to exercise the other faculties of his nature. 

If this ideal had been reached, the instinct, like 
all those perfectly adjusted, would tend to become 
unconscious; and we should miss those secondary 
effects with which we are exclusively concerned 
in aesthetics. For it is precisely from the waste, 
from the radiation of the sexual passion, that 
beauty borrows warmth. As a harp, made to 
vibrate to the fingers, gives some music to every 
wind, so the nature of man, necessarily suscepti- 
ble to woman, becomes simultaneously sensitive 
to other influences, and capable of tenderness 
toward every object. The capacity to love gives 



THB MATERIALS OF BEAUTY 59 

our contemplation that glow without which it 
might often fail to manifest beauty; and the 
whole sentimental side of our aesthetic sensibility 
— without which it would be perceptive and 
mathematical rather than aesthetic — is due to 
our sexual organization remotely stirred. 

The attraction of sex could not become efficient 
unless the senses were first attracted. The eye 
must be fascinated and the ear charmed by the 
object which nature intends should be pursued. 
Both sexes for this reason develope secondary 
sexual characteristics; and the sexual emotions 
are simultaneously extended to various secondary 
objects. The colour, the grace, the form, which 
become the stimuli of sexual passion, and the // 
guides of sexual selection, acquire, before they 
can fulfil that office, a certain intrinsic charm. 
This charm is not only present for reasons which, 
in an admissible sense, we may call teleological, 
on account, that is, of its past utility in reproduc- 
tion, but its intensity and power are due to the 
simultaneous stirring of profound sexual impulses. 
Not, of course, that any specifically sexual ideas 
are connected with these feelings : such ideas are 
absent in a modest and inexperienced mind even 
in the obviously sexual passions of love and jeal- 
ousy. 

These secondary objects of interest, which are 
some of the most conspicuous elements of beauty, 
are to be called sexual for these two reasons: 
because the contingencies of the sexual function 
have helped to establish them in our race, and 



60 THE SENSE OF BEAUTY 

because they owe their fascination in a great 
measure to the participation of our sexual life 
in the reaction which they cause. 

If any one were desirous to produce a being 
with a great susceptibility to beauty, he could 
not invent an instrument better designed for that 
object than sex. Individuals that need not unite 
for the birth and rearing of each generation! 
might retain a savage independence. For them 
it would not be necessary that any vision should 
fascinate, or that any languor should soften, the 
prying cruelty of the eye. But sex endows the 
individual with a*-dumb and powerful instinct, 
which carries his body and soul continually 
towards another; makes it one of the dearest 
employments of his life to select and pursue a 
companion, and joins to possession the keenest 
pleasure, to rivalry the fiercest rage, and to soli- 
tude an eternal melancholy. 

What more could be needed to suffuse the world 
with the deepest meaning and beauty? The atten- 
tion is fixed upon a well-defined object, and all the 
effects it produces in the mind are easily regarded 
as powers or qualities of that object. But these 
effects are here powerful and profound. The 
soul is stirred to its depths. . Its hidden treas- 
ures are brought to the surface of consciousness. 
The imagination and the heart awake for the 
first time. All these new values crystallize about 
the objects then offered to the mind. If the fancy 
is occupied by the image of a single person, whose 
qualities have had the power of precipitating this 



THE MATERIALS OF BEAUTY 61 

revolution, all the values gather about that one 
image. The object becomes perfect, and we are 
said to be in love. 1 If the stimulus does not 
appear as a definite image, the values evoked 
are dispersed over the world, and we are said to 
have become lovers of nature, and to have dis- 
covered the beauty and meaning of things. 

To a certain extent this kind of interest will 
centre in the proper object of sexual passion, and 
in the special characteristics of the opposite sex; 
and we find accordingly that woman is the most 
lovely object to man, and man, if female modesty 
would confess it, the most interesting to woman. 
But the effects of so fundamental and primitive 
a reaction are much more general. Sex is not 
the only object of sexual passion. When love 
lacks its specific object, when it does not yet 
understand itself, or has been sacrificed to some 
other interest, we see the stifled fire bursting out 
in various directions. One is religious devotion, 
another is zealous philanthropy, a third is the 
fondling of pet animals, but not the least fortu- 
nate is the love of nature, and of art; for nature 
also is often a second mistress that consoles us 
for the loss of a first. Passion then overflows 
and visibly floods those neighbouring regions 
which it had always secretly watered. For the 
same nervous organization which sex involves, 
with its necessarily wide branchings and associa- 
tions in the brain, must be partially stimulated 

* Of. aundlud, De V Amour, pasrim. 



62 THE SENSE OF BEAUTY 

by other objects than its specific or ultimate one* 
especially in man, who, unlike some of the lower 
animals, has not his instincts clearly distinct and 
intermittent, but always partially active, and 
never active in isolation. We may say, then, 
that for man all nature is a secondary object of 
sexual passion, and that to this fact the beauty 
of nature is largely due. 

social imtimcu § 14, The function of reproduction 
t**ti* /j0fo- carries with it not only direct modifi- 



cations of the body and mind, but a 
whole set of social institutions, for the existence 
of which social instincts and habits are necessary 
in man. These social feelings, the parental, the 
patriotic, or the merely gregarious, are not of 
much direct value for aesthetics, although, as is 
seen in the case of fashions, they are important in 
determining the duration and prevalence of a taste 
once formed. Indirectly they are of vast impor- 
tance and play a great rdle in arts like poetry, 
where the effect depends on what is signified more 
than on what is offered to sense. Any appeal to a 
human interest rebounds in favour of a work of art 
in which it is successfully made. That interest, 
uneesthetic in itself, helps to fix the attention and 
to furnish subject-matter and momentum to arts 
and modes of appreciation which are aesthetic. 
Thus comprehension of the passion of love is nec- 
essary to the appreciation of numberless songs, 
plays, and novels, and not a few works of musical 
and plastic art. 



THE MATERIALS OF BEAUTY 68 

The treatment of these matters must be post- 
poned until we are prepared to deal with expres- 
sion — the most complex element of effect. It will 
suffice here to point out why social and gregarious 
impulses; in the satisfaction of which happiness 
mainly resides, are those in which beauty finds least 
support. This may help us to understand better 
the relations between aesthetics and hedonics, and 
the nature of that objectification in which we hare 
placed the difference between beauty and pleasure. 

So long as happiness is conceived as a poet 
might conceive it, namely, in its immediately sen- 
suous and emotional factors, so long as we live in 
the moment and make our happiness consist in the 
simplest things, — in breathing, seeing, hearing, 
loving, and sleeping, — our happiness has the 
same substance, the same elements, as our ®s- 
thetic delight, for it is aesthetic delight that 
makes our happiness. Yet poets and artists, with 
their immediate and aesthetic joys, are not thought 
to be happy men; they themselves are apt to be 
loud in their lamentations, and to regard them- 
selves as eminently and tragically unhappy. This 
arises from the intensity and inconstancy of their 
emotions, from their improvidence, and from the 
eccentricity of their social habits. While among 
them the sensuous and vital functions have the 
upper hand, the gregarious and social instincts 
are subordinated and often deranged; and their 
unhappiness consists in the sense of their unfit* 
ness to live in the world into which they are 
born. 



64 THE 8KN8E OF BEAUTY 

Bat man is pre-eminently a political animal, 
and social needs are almost as fundamental in 
him as vital functions, and often more conscious. 
Friendship, wealth, reputation, power, and influ- 
ence, when added to family life, constitute surely 
the main elements of happiness. Now these are 
only very partially composed of definite images of 
objects. The desire for them, the consciousness 
of their absence or possession, comes upon us only 
when we reflect, when we are planning, consider- 
ing the future, gathering the words of others, 
rehearsing their scorn or admiration for ourselves, 
conceiving possible situations in which our virtue, 
our fame or power would become conspicuous, 
comparing our lot with that of others, and going 
through other discursive processes of thought. 
Apprehension, doubt, isolation, are things which 
come upon us keenly when we reflect upon our 
lives; they cannot easily become qualities of 
any object. If by chance they can, they acquire 
a great esthetic value. For instance, "home/' 
which in its social sense is a concept of happi- 
ness, when it becomes materialized in a cottage 
and a garden becomes an aesthetic concept, becomes 
a beautiful thing. The happiness is objectified, 
and the object beautified. 

Social objects, however, are seldom thus aes- 
thetic, because they are not thus definitely imag- 
inable. They are diffuse and abstract, and verbal 
rather than sensuous in their materials. There- 
fore the great emotions that go with them are 
not immediately transmutable into beauty. If 



THE MATERIALS OF BEAUTY 65 

artists and poets are unhappy, it is after all be- 
cause happiness does not interest them. They 
cannot seriously pursue it, because its components 
are not components of beauty, and being in lore 
with beauty, they neglect and despise those unaea- 
thetio social virtues in the operation of which hap- 
piness is found. On the other hand those who 
pursue happiness conceived merely in the abstract 
and conventional terms, as money, success, or re- 
spectability; often miss that real and fundamental 
part of happiness which flows from the senses and 
imagination. This element is what aesthetics sup- 
plies to life; for beauty also can be a cause and a 
factor of happiness. Yet the happiness of loving 
beauty is either too sensuous to be stable, or else 
too ultimate, too sacramental, to be accounted hap- 
piness by the worldly mind. . 



§ 16. The senses of touch, taste, and Tk4t 
smell, although capable no doubt of a 
great development, have not served in man for the 
purposes of intelligence so much as those of sight 
and hearing. It is natural that as they remain 
normally in the background of consciousness, and 
furnish the least part of our objectified ideas, the 
pleasures connected with them should remain also 
detached, and unused for the purpose of apprecia- 
tion of nature. They have been called the unaas- 
thetic, as well as the lower, senses; but the 
propriety of these epithets, which is undeniable, 
is due not to any intrinsic sensuality or baseness 
of these senses, but to the function which they hap- 



66 THE SENSE Of BEAUTY 

pen to have in our experience. Smell and taste, 
like hearing, have the great disadvantage of not 
being intrinsically spatial: they are therefore not 
fitted to serve for the representation of nature, 
which allows herself to be accurately conceived 
only in spatial terms. 1 They have not reached, 
moreover, the same organization as sounds, and 
therefore cannot furnish any play of subjective 
sensation comparable to music in interest. 

The objectification of musical forms is due to 
their fixity and complexity: like words, they are 
thought of as existing in a social medium, and can 
be beautiful without being spatial. But tastes 
have never been so accurately or universally 
classified and distinguished; the instrument of 
sensation does not allow such nice and stable 
discriminations as does the ear. The art of com- 
bining dishes and wines, although one which 
everybody practises with more or less skill and 
attention, deals with a material far too unrepre- 
sentable to be called beautiful. The art remains 
in the sphere of the pleasant, and is consequently 
regarded as servile, rather than fine. 

Artists in life, if that expression may be used 
for those who have beautified social and domestic 
existence, have appealed continually to these lower 
senses. A fragrant garden, and savoury meats, 

1 This is not the place to enter into % discussion of the meta- 
physical value of the idea of space. Suffice it to point out that 
in human experience serviceable knowledge of our environment 
is to be had only in spatial symbols, and, for whatever reason 
or accident, this is the language which the mind must speak if 
it is to advance in clearness and efficiency. 



THB MATERIALS OF BEAUTY G7 

incense, and perfumes, soft stuffs, and delicious 
colours, form our ideal of oriental luxuries, an 
ideal which appeals too much to human nature 
ever to lose its charm. Yet our northern poets 
have seldom attempted to arouse these images in 
their sensuous intensity, without relieving them 
by some imaginative touch. In Keats, for ex- 
ample, we find the following lines : — 

And still she slept in azure-lidded sleep, 
In blanched linen, smooth and lavendered, 
While he from forth the closet brought a heap 
Of candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd, 
With jellies soother than the creamy curd, 
And lucent syrops tinct with cinnamon; 
Manna and dates in argosy transferred 
From Fez ; and spiced dainties, every one 
From silken Samarcand to cedared Lebanon. 

Even the most sensuous of English poets, in 
whom the love of beauty is supreme, cannot keep 
long to the primal elements of beauty; the higher 
flight is inevitable for him. And how much does 
not the appeal to things in argosy transferred 
from Fez, reinforced with the reference to Sam- 
arcand and especially to the authorized beauties 
of the cedars of Lebanon, which even the Puritan 
may sing without a blush, add to our wavering 
satisfaction and reconcile our conscience to this 
unchristian indulgence of sense! 

But the time may be near when such scruples 
will be less common, and our poetry, with our 
other arts, will dwell nearer to the fountain-head 
of all inspiration. For if nothing not once in 



68 THE SENSE OF BEAUTY 

sense is to be found in the intellect, much less is 
such a thing to be found in the imagination. If 
the cedars of Lebanon did not spread a grateful 
shade, or the winds rustle through the maze of 
their branches, if Lebanon had never been beauti- 
ful to sense, it would not now be a fit or poetic 
subject of allusion. And the word " Fez " would 
be without imaginative value if no traveller had 
ever felt the intoxication of the torrid sun, the 
languors of oriental luxury, or, like the British 
soldier, cried amid the dreary moralities of his 
native land: — 

Take me somewhere east of Sues 

Where the best is like the wont, 
Where there ain't no ten commandments 

And a man may raise a thirst 

Nor would Samarkand bp anything but for the 
mystery of the desert and the pioturesqueness 
of caravans, nor would an argosy be poetic if 
the sea had no voices and no foam, the winds 
and oars no resistance, and the rudder and taut 
sheets no pull. From these real sensations imagi- 
nation draws its life, and suggestion its power. 
The sweep of the fancy is itself also agreeable; 
but the superiority of the distant over the pres- 
ent is only due to the mass and variety of the 
pleasures that can be suggested, compared with 
the poverty of those that can at any time be felt. 



f 18. Sound shares with the lower 
senses the disadvantage of having no intrinsic 
spatial character; it, therefore, forms no part of 



THE MATEBIAUB OF BEAUTY 69 

the properly abstracted external world, and the 
pleasures of the ear cannot become! in the literal 
sense, qualities of things. But there is in sounds 
such an exquisite and continuous gradation in 
pitch, and such a measurable relation in length, 
that an object almost as complex and desoribable 
as the visible one can be built out of them. 
What gives spatial forms their value in descrip- 
tion of the environment is the ease with which 
discriminations and comparisons can be made in 
spatial objects: they are measurable, while un- 
spatial sensations commonly are not. But sounds 
are also measurable in their own category: they 
have comparable pitches and durations, and defi- 
nite and recognizable combinations of those sensu- 
ous elements are as truly objects as chairs and 
tables. Not that a musical composition exists 
in any mystical way, as a portion of the musio 
of the spheres, which no one is hearing; but 
that, tot a critical philosophy, visible objects are 
also nothing but possibilities of sensation. The 
real wfrld is merely the shadow of that assurance 
of eventual experience which accompanies sanity. 
This objectivity can accrue to any mental figment 
that has enough cohesion, content, and indi- 
viduality to be describable and recognizable, and 
these qualities belong no less to audible than to 
spatial ideas. 

There is, accordingly, some justification in 
Schopenhauer's speculative assertion that music 
repeats the entire world of sense, and is a paral- 
lel method of expression of the underlying sub- 



TO the asms or beauty 

stance, or wiU. The world of sound is certainly 
capable of infinite variety and, were our sense 
developed, of infinite extensions; and it has as 
much as the world of matter the power to interest 
ns and to stir our emotions. It was therefore 
potentially as foil of meaning. Bat it has proved 
the less serviceable and constant apparition; and, 
therefore, music, which builds with its materials, 
while the purest and most impressive of the arts, 
is the least human and instructive of them. 

The pleasantness of sounds has a simple physical 
basis. All sensations are pleasant only between 
certain limits of intensity; but the ear can dis- 
criminate easily between noises, that in themselves 
are uninteresting, if not annoying, and notes, 
which have an unmistakable charm. A sound is 
a note if the pulsations of the air by which it 
is produced recur at regular intervals. If there 
is no regular recurrence of waves, it is a noise. 
The rapidity of these regular beats determines the 
pitch of tones. That quality or timbre by which 
one sound is distinguished from another of the 
same pitch and intensity is due to the different 
complications of waves in the air; the ability to 
discriminate the various waves in the vibrating air 
is, therefore, the condition of our finding music 
in it; for every wave has its period, and what we 
call a noise is a complication of notes too com- 
plex for our organs or our attention to decipher. 

We find here, at the very threshold of our sub- 
ject, a clear instance of a conflict of principles 
which appears everywhere in aesthetics, and is 



THE MATERIAL OF BEAUTY 71 

the source and explanation of many conflicts of 
taste. Since a note is heard when a set of regu-. 
lar vibrations can be discriminated in the chaos 
of sound, it appears that the perception and value 
of this artistic element depends on abstraction, 
on the omission from the field of attention, of 
all the elements which do not conform to a sim- 
ple law. This may be called the principle of 
purity. But if it were the only principle at 
work, there would be no music more beautiful 
than the tone of a tuning-fork. Such sounds, 
although delightful perhaps to a child, are soon 
tedious. The principle of purity must make some 
compromise with another principle, which we may 
call that of interest. The object must have 
enough variety and expression to hold our atten- 
tion for a while, and to stir our nature widely. 

As we are more acutely sensitive to results or 
to processes, we find the most agreeable effect 
nearer to one or to the other of these extremes 
of a tedious beauty or of an unbeautiful expres- 
siveness. But these principles, as is clear, are 
not co-ordinate. The child who enjoys his rattle 
or his trumpet has aesthetic enjoyment, of how- 
ever rude a kind; but the master of technique 
who should give a performance wholly without 
sensuous charm would be a gymnast and not a 
musician, and the author whose novels and poems 
should be merely expressive, and interesting only 
by their meaning and moral, would be a writer 
of history or philosophy, but not an artist. The 
principle of purity is therefore essential to 



72 THE SENSE OF BEAUTY 

aesthetic effect, but the principle of interest is 
subsidiary, and if appealed to alone would fail 
to produce beauty. 

The distinction, however, is not absolute: for the 
simple sensation is itself interesting, and the com- 
plication, if it is appreciable by sense and does 
not require discursive thought to grasp it, is itself 
beautiful. There may be a work of art in which 
the sensuous materials are not pleasing, as a dis- 
course without euphony, if the structure and 
expression give delight; and there may be an 
interesting object without perceived structure, like 
musical notes, or the blue sky. Perfection would, 
of course, lie in the union of elements all intrin- 
sically beautiful, in forms also intrinsically so; 
but where this is impossible, different natures 
prefer to sacrifice one or the other advantage. 

Odour. § 17. i n the eye we have an organ 

so differentiated that it is sensitive to a much 
more subtle influence than even that of air waves. 
There seems to be, in the interstellar spaces, some 
pervasive fluid, for the light of the remotest star 
is rapidly conveyed to us, and we can hardly 
understand how this radiation of light, which 
takes place beyond our atmosphere, could be real- 
ized without some medium. This hypothetical 
medium we call the ether. It is capable of very 
rapid vibrations, which are propagated in all 
directions, like the waves of sound, only much 
more quickly. Many common observations, such 
as the apparent interval between lightning and 



THE MATERIALS OF BEAUTY 73 

thunder, make us aware of the quicker motion of 
light. Now, since nature was filled with this 
responsive fluid, which propagated to all distances 
vibrations originating at any point, and moreover 
as these vibrations, when intercepted by a solid 
body, were reflected wholly or in part, it obvi- 
ously became very advantageous to every animal 
to develope an organ sensitive to these vibrations 
— sensitive, that is, to light. For this would 
give the mind instantaneous impressions depend- 
ent upon the presence and nature of distant 
objects. 

To this circumstance we must attribute the 
primacy of sight in our perception, a primacy 
that makes light the natural symbol of knowl- 
edge. When the time came for our intelligence 
to take the great metaphysical leap, and conceive 
its content as permanent and independent, or, in 
other words, to imagine things, the idea of these 
things had to be constructed out of the materials 
already present to the mind. But the fittest 
material for such construction was that furnished 
by the eye, since it is the eye that brings us into 
widest relations with our actual environment, and 
gives us the quickest warning of approaching 
impressions. Sight has a prophetic function. 
We are less interested in it for itself than for 
the suggestion it brings of what may follow after. 
Sight is a method of presenting psychically what 
is practically absent; and as the essence of the 
thing is its existence in our absence, the thing is 
spontaneously conceived in terms of sight. 



74 THE SENSE OF BEAUTY 

Sight is, therefore, perception par excellence, sinoe 
we become most easily aware of objects through 
visual agency and in visual terms. Now, as the 
values of perception are those we call aesthetic, 
and there could be no beauty if there was no 
conception of independent objects, we may expect 
to find beauty derived mainly from the pleasures 
of sight. And, in fact, form, which is almost a 
synonym of beauty, is for us usually something 
visible: it is a synthesis of the seen. But prior 
to the effect of form, which arises in the con- 
structive imagination, comes the effect of colour; 
this is purely sensuous, and no better intrinsically 
than the effects of any other sense: but being 
more involved in the perception of objects than 
are the rest, it becomes more readily an element 
of beauty. 

The values of colours differ appreciably and 
have analogy to the differing values of other sen- 
sations. As sweet or pungent smells, as high and 
low notes, or major and minor chords, differ from 
each other by virtue of their different stimulation 
of the senses, so also red differs from green, and 
green from violet. There is a nervous process 
for each, and consequently a specific value. This 
emotional quality has affinity to the emotional 
quality of other sensations; we need not be sur- 
prised that the high rate of vibration which 
yields a sharp note to the ear should involve 
somewhat the same feeling that is produced by 
the high rate of vibration which, to the eye, 
yields a violet colour. These affinities escape 



THE MATERIALS OF BEAUTY 75 

many minds; but it is conceivable that the sense 
of them should be improved by accident or train- 
ing. There are certain effects of colour which 
give all men pleasure, and others which jar, almost 
like a musical discord. A more general develop- 
ment of this sensibility would make possible a 
new abstract art, an art that should deal with 
colours as music does with sound. 

We have not studied these effects, however, 
with enough attention, we have not allowed them 
to penetrate enough into the soul, to think them 
very significant. The stimulation of fireworks, 
or of kaleidoscopic effects, seems to us trivial 
But everything which has a varied content has a 
potentiality of form and also of meaning. The 
form will be enjoyed as soon as attention accus- 
toms us to discriminate and recognize its varia- 
tions; and meaning will accrue to it, when the 
various emotional values of these forms ally the 
new object to all other experiences which involve 
similar emotions, and thus give it a sympathetic 
environment in the mind. The colours of the 
sunset have a brilliancy that attracts attention, and 
a softness and illusiveness that enchant the eye; 
while the many associations of the evening and 
of heaven gather about this kindred charm and 
deepen it. Thus the most sensuous of beauties 
can be full of sentimental suggestion* In stained 
glass, also, we have an example of masses of 
colour made to exert their powerful direct influ- 
ence, to intensify an emotion eventually to be 
attached to very ideal objects; what is in itself 



76 THE SENSE OF BEAUTY 

a gorgeous and unmeaning ornament, by its abso- 
lute impressivene8S becomes a vivid symbol of 
those other ultimates which have a similar power 
over the soul. 

Mtmimto | ]& *ff e j 1SLYe now go ne over those 

organs of perception that give us the 
materials out of which we construct objects, and 
mentioned the most conspicuous pleasures which, 
as they arise from those organs, are easily merged 
in the ideas furnished by the same. We have 
also noticed that these ideas, conspicuous as they 
are in our developed and operating consciousness, 
are not so much factors in our thought, inde- 
pendent contributors to it, as they are discrimi- 
nations and excisions in its content, which, after 
they are all made, leave still a background of 
vital feeling. For the outer senses are but a 
portion of our sensorium, and the ideas of each, 
or of all together, but a portion of our conscious- 
ness. 

The pleasures which accompany ideation we 
have also found to be unitary and vital; only 
just as for practical purposes it is necessary to 
abstract and discriminate the contribution of one 
sense from that of another, and thus to become 
aware of particular and definable impressions, 
so it is natural that the diffused emotional tone 
of the body should also be divided, and a certain 
modicum of pleasure or pain should be attributed 
to each idea. Our pleasures are thus described 
as the pleasures of touch, taste, smell, hearing, 



THE MATERIALS OF BEAUTY 77 

and sight, and may become elements of beauty at 
the same time as the ideas to which they are 
attached become elements of objects. There is, 
however, a remainder of emotion as there is a 
remainder of sensation; and the importance of 
this remainder — of the continuum in which lie 
all particular pleasures and pains — was insisted 
upon in the beginning. 

The beauty of the world, indeed, cannot be 
attributed wholly or mainly to pleasures thus 
attached to abstracted sensations. It is only the 
beauty of the materials of things which is drawn 
from the pleasures of sensation. By far the most 
important effects are not attributable to these 
materials, but to their arrangement and their 
ideal relations. We have yet to study those proc- 
esses of our mind by which this arrangement 
and these relations are conceived; and the pleas- 
ures which we can attach to these processes may 
then be added to the pleasures attached to sense 
as further and more subtle elements of beauty. 

But before passing to the consideration of this 
more intricate subject, we may note that however 
subordinate the beauty may be which a garment, 
a building, or a poem derives from its sensuous 
material, yet the presence of this sensuous mate- 
rial is indispensable. Form cannot be the form 
of nothing. If, then, in finding or creating 
beauty, we ignore the materials of things, and 
attend only to their form, we miss an ever-pres- 
ent opportunity to heighten our effects. For 
whatever delight the form may bring, the material 



T8 THE SENSE OF BEAUTY 

might have given delight already, and so much 
would have been gained towards the value of the 
total result. 

Sensuous beauty is not the greatest or most 
important element of effect, but it is the most 
primitive and fundamental, and the most uni- 
versal. There is no effect of form which an 
effect of material could not enhance, and this 
effect of material, underlying that of form, raises 
the latter to a higher power and gives the beauty 
of the object a certain poignancy, thoroughness, 
and infinity which it otherwise would have* 
lacked. The Parthenon not in marble, the king's 
crown not of gold, and the stars not of fire, 
would be feeble and prosaic things. The greater 
hold which material beauty has upon the senses, 
stimulates us here, where the form is also sublime, 
and lifts and intensifies our emotions. We need 
this stimulus if our perceptions are to reach the 
highest pitch of strength and acuteness. Nothing 
can be ravishing that is not beautiful pervasively. 

And another point. The wider diffusion of sen- 
suous beauty makes it as it were the poor man's 
good. Fewer factors are needed to produce it and 
less training to appreciate it. The senses are in- 
dispensable instruments of labour, developed by 
the necessities of life; but their perfeot develop- 
ment produces a harmony between the inward 
structure and instinct of the organ and the out- 
ward opportunities for its use; and this harmony 
is the source of continual pleasures. In the sphere 
of sense, therefore, a certain cultivation is inev* 



THE MATERIALS OF BEAUTY 79 

itable in man; often greater, indeed, among rude 
peoples, perhaps among animals, than among 
those whose attention takes a wider sweep and 
whose ideas are more abstract. Without requir- 
ing, therefore, that a man should rise above his 
station, or develope capacities which his oppor- 
tunities will seldom employ, we may yet endow 
his life with aesthetic interest, if we allow him 
the enjoyment of sensuous beauty. This enriches 
him without adding to his labour, and flatters him 
without alienating him from his world. 

Taste, when it is spontaneous, always begins 
with the senses. Children and savages, as we 
are so often told, delight in bright and variegated 
colours; the simplest people appreciate the neat- 
ness of muslin ourtains, shining varnish, and 
burnished pots. A rustic garden is a shallow 
patchwork of the liveliest flowers, without that 
reserve and repose which is given by spaces and 
masses. Noise and vivacity is all that childish 
music contains, and primitive songs add little 
more of form than what is required to compose 
a few monotonous cadences. These limitations 
are not to be regretted; they are a proof of sin- 
cerity. Such simplicity is not the absence of 
taste, but the beginning of it. 

A people with genuine aesthetic perceptions 
creates traditional forms and expresses the simple 
pathos of its life, in unchanging but significant 
themes, repeated by generation after generation. 
When sincerity is lost, and a snobbish ambition 
is substituted bad taste comes in. The essence 



80 THE SENSE OF BEAUTT 

of it is a substitution of non-aesthetic for aes- 
thetic values. To love glass beads because they are 
beautiful is barbarous, perhaps, but not vulgar; to 
love jewels only because they are dear is vulgar, 
and to betray the motive by placing them ineffec- 
tively is an offence against taste. The test is 
always the same: Does the thing itself actually 
please? If it does, your taste is real; it may be 
different from that of others, but is equally jus- 
tified and grounded in human nature. If it does 
not, your whole judgment is spurious, and you are 
guilty, not of heresy, which in aesthetics is ortho- 
doxy itself, but of hypocrisy, which is a self- 
excommunication from its sphere. 

Now, a great sign of this hypocrisy is insensi- 
bility to sensuous beauty. When people show 
themselves indifferent to primary and funda- 
mental effects, when they are incapable of finding 
pictures except in frames or beauties except in 
the great masters, we may justly suspect that 
they are parrots, and that their verbal and his- 
torical knowledge covers a natural lack of aesthetic 
sense. Where, on the contrary, insensibility to 
higher forms of beauty does not exclude a natural 
love of the lower, we have every reason to be 
encouraged; there is a true and healthy taste, 
which only needs experience to refine it. If a 
man demands light, sound, and splendour, he 
proves that he has the aesthetic equilibrium; that 
appearances as such interest him, and that he 
can pause in perception to enjoy. We have but 
to vary his observation, to enlarge his thought, 



THE MATERIALS OF BEAUTY 81 

to multiply his discriminations — all of which 
education can do — and the same aesthetic habit 
will reveal to him every shade of the fit and 
fair. Or if it should not, and the man, although 
sensuously gifted, proved to be imaginatively 
dull, at least he would not have failed to catch 
an intimate and wide-spread element of effect. 
The beauty of material is thus the groundwork 
of all higher beauty, both in the object, whose 
form and meaning have to be lodged in some- 
thing sensible, and in the mind, where sensuous 
ideas, being the first to emerge, are the first 
that can arouse delight. 



PART in 

FORM 
»«•/*« { 19. The most remarkable and char- 

OOQUtg Of 

form. acteristie problem of aesthetics is that 

of beauty of form. Where there is a 
sensuous delight, like that of colour, and the 
impression of the object is in its elements agree- 
able, we have to look no farther for an explana- 
tion of the charm we feel. Where there is 
expression, and an object indifferent to the 
senses is associated with other ideas which are 
interesting, the problem, although complex and 
varied, is in principle comparatively plain. But 
there is an intermediate effect which is more 
mysterious, and more specifically an effect of 
beauty. It is found where sensible elements, 
by themselves indifferent, are so united as to 
please in combination. There is something unex- 
pected in this phenomenon, so much so that those 
who cannot conceive its explanation often reassure 
themselves by denying its existence. To reduce 
beauty of form, however, to beauty of elements 
would not be easy, because the creation and varia- 
tion of effect, by changing the relation of the 
simplest lines, offers too easy an experiment in 
refutation. And it would, moreover, follow to 
82 




FORM 83 

the comfort of the vulgar that all marble houses 
are eq^ially beautiful. 

To attribute beauty of form to expression 

is more plausible. If I take the meaning- zr 

less short lines in the figure and arrange El 

them in the given ways, intended to repre- rz 

sent the human face, there appear at once 
notably different aes- 
thetic values. Two 
of the forms are 
differently grotesque 
and one approximately 
beautiful. Now these 
effects are due to the 
expression of the 
lines; not only because they make one think of 
fair or ugly faces, but because, it may be said, 
these faces would in reality be fair or ugly 
according to their expression, according to the 
vital and moral associations of the different types. 

Nevertheless, beauty of form cannot be reduced 
to expression without denying the existence of 
immediate aesthetic values altogether, and reduc- 
ing them all to suggestions of moral good. For 
if the object expressed by the form, and from 
which the form derives its value, had itself 
beauty of form, we should not advance; we must 
come somewhere to the point where the expres- 
sion is of something else than beauty'; and this 
something else would of course be some practical 
or moral good. Moralists are fond of such an 
interpretation, and it is a very interesting one. 
It puts beauty in the same relation to morals in 



84 THE SENSE OF BEAUTY 

which morals stand to pleasure and pain; both 
would be intuitions, qualitatively new, but with 
the same materials; they would be new perspec- 
tives of the same object. 

But this theory is actually inadmissible. In- 
numerable aesthetic effects, indeed all specific and 
unmixed ones, are direct transmutations of pleas- 
ures and pains; they express nothing extrinsic to 
themselves, much less moral excellences. The 
detached lines of our figure signify nothing, but 
they are not absolutely uninteresting; the straight 
line is the simplest and not the least beautiful of 
forms. To say that it owes its interest to the 
thought of the economy of travelling over the 
shortest road, or of other practical advantages, 
would betray a feeble hold on psychological reality. 
The impression of a straight line differs in a cer- 
tain almost emotional way from that of a curve, 
as those of various curves do from one another. 
The quality of the sensation is different, like 
that of various colours or sounds. To attribute 
the character of these forms to association would 
be like explaining sea-sickness as the fear of 
shipwreck. There is a distinct quality and value, 
often a singular beauty, in these simple lines that 
is intrinsic in the perception of their form. 

It would be pedantic, perhaps, anywhere but 
in a treatise on aesthetics, to deny to this quality 
the name of expression; we might commonly say 
that the circle has one expression and the oval 
another. But what does the circle express except 
circularity, or the oval except the nature of the 



86 

ellipse? Such expression expresses nothing; it 
is really impression. There may be analogy be- 
tween it and other impressions; we may admit 
that odours, colours, and sounds correspond, and 
may mutually suggest one another; but this 
analogy is a superadded charm felt by very sensi- 
tive natures, and does not constitute the original 
value of the sensations. The common emotional 
tinge is rather what enables them to suggest one 
another, and what makes them comparable. Their 
expression, such as it is, is therefore due to the 
accident that both feelings have a kindred quality; 
and this quality has its effectiveness for sense in- 
dependently of the perception of its recurrence 
in a different sphere. We shall accordingly take 
care to reserve the term "expression" for the sug- 
gestion of some other and assignable object, from 
which the expressive thing borrows an interest; 
and we shall speak of the intrinsic quality of 
forms as their emotional tinge or specific value. 

f 90. The charm of a line evidently P*yhi*§yof 
consists in the relation of its parts; in */jE£! t " h " 
order to understand this interest in 
spatial relations, we must inquire how they are 
perceived. 1 If the eye had its sensitive surface, 
the retina, exposed directly to the light, we could 
never have a perception of form any more than 
in the nose or ear, which also perceive the object 

* The discussion ii limited in this chapter to risible form; 
audible form is probably capable of a parallel treatment, bat 
requires studies too technical for this place. 



ar 



THE 8KN8K OF BEAUTY 



through media. When the perception is not 
through a medium, but direct, as in the case of 
the skin, we might get a notion of form, because 
each point of the object would excite a single 
point in the skin, and as the sensations in differ- 
ent parts of the skin differ in quality, a mani- 
fold of sense, in which discrimination of parts 
would be involved, could be presented to the 
mind. But when the perception is through a 
medium, a difficulty arises. 

Any point, a, in the object will send a ray to 
every point, a', V, c f , of the sensitive surface; every 

point of the retina will 
i therefore be similarly 
affected, since each will 
receive rays from every 
part of the object. If 
all the rays from one 
point of the object, a, 
are to be concentrated 
on a corresponding 
point of the retina, a', which would then become the 
exclusive representative of a, we must have one or 
more refracting surfaces interposed, to gather the 
rays together. The presence of the lens, with its 
various coatings, has made representation of point 
by point possible for the eye. The absence of such 
an instrument makes the same sort of representa- 
tion impossible to other senses, such as the nose, 
which does not smell in one place the effluvia of 
one part of the environment and in another place 
the effluvia of another, but smells indiscriminately 




FORM 87 

the combination of all. Eyes without lenses like 
those possessed by some animals, undoubtedly give 
only a consciousness of diffused light, without the 
possibility of boundaries or divisions in the field 
of view. The abstraction of colour from form is 
therefore by no means an artificial one, since, by 
a simplification of the organ of sense, one may be 
perceived without the other. 

But even if the lens enables the eye to receive 
a distributed image of the object, the manifold 
which consciousness would perceive would not be 
necessarily a manifold of parts juxtaposed in 
space. Each point of the retina might send to the 
brain a detached impression; these might be com- 
parable, but not necessarily in their spatial posi- 
tion. The ear sends to the brain such a manifold 
of impressions (since the ear also has an apparatus 
by which various external differences in rapidity 
of vibrations are distributed into different parts of 
the organ). But this discriminated manifold is a 
manifold of pitches, not of positions. How does 
it happen that the manifold conveyed by the optic 
nerve appears in consciousness as spatial, and that 
the relation between its elements is seen as a rela- 
tion of position? 

An answer to this question has been suggested 
by various psychologists. The eye, by an instinc- 
tive movement, turns so as to bring every impres- 
sion upon that point of the retina, near its centre, 
which has the acutest sensibility. A series of 
muscular sensations therefore always follows upon 
the conspicuous excitement of any outlying point 



88 THE SENSE OF BEAUTY 

The object, as the eye brings it to the centre of 
vision, excites a series of points upon the retina; 
and the local sign, or peculiar quality of sensation, 
proper to each of these spots, is associated with 
that series of muscular feelings involved in turn- 
ing the eyes. These feelings henceforth revive 
together; it is enough that a point in the periphery 
of the retina should receive a ray, for the mind to 
feel, together with that impression, the suggestion 
of a motion, and of the line of points that lies 
between the excited point and the centre of vision. 
A network of associations is thus formed, whereby 
the sensation of each retinal point is connected 
with all the others in a manner which is that of 
points in a plane. Every visible point becomes 
thus a point in a field, and has a felt radiation of 
lines of possible motion about it. Our notion of 
visual space has this origin, since the manifold 
of retinal impressions is distributed in a manner 
which serves as the type and exemplar of what we 
mean by a surface. 

V ^HMeai ^ 21 * Tne reader ^^ P 61 ^!* V** m 
figures. don these details and the strain they 

put on his attention, when he per- 
ceives how much they help us to understand the 
value of forms. The sense, then, of the position 
of any point consists in the tensions in the eye, 
that not only tends to bring that point to the 
centre of vision, but feels the suggestion of all 
the other points which are related to the given 
one in the web of visual experience. The defi- 



F-jfcM 89 

nition of space as the possibility of motion is 
therefore an accurate and significant one, since 
the most direct and native perception of space 
we can have is the awakening of many tenden- 
cies to move our organs. 

For example, if a circle is presented, the eye 
will fall upon its centre, as to the centre of gravity, 
as it were, of the balanced attractions of all the 
points; and there will be, in that position, an in- 
difference and sameness of sensation, in whatever 
direction some accident moves the eye, that 
accounts very well for the emotional quality of 
the circle. It is a form which, although beautiful 
in its purity and simplicity, and wonderful in its 
continuity, lacks any stimulating quality, and is 
often ugly in the arts, especially when found in 
vertical surfaces where it is not always seen in 
perspective. For horizontal surfaces it is better 
because it is there always an ellipse to vision, and 
the ellipse has a less dull and stupefying effect. 
The eye can move easily, organize and subordi- 
nate its parts, and its relations to the environment 
are not similar in all directions. Small circles, 
like buttons, are not in the same danger of 
becoming ugly, because the eye considers them as 
points, and they diversify and help to divide 
surfaces, without appearing as surfaces them- 
selves. 

The straight line offers a curious object for 
analysis. It is not for the eye a very easy form 
to grasp. We bend it or we leave it. Unless it 
passes through the centre of vision, it if obvi- 



90 the nn or beauty 

ously a tangent to the points which hare analo- 
gous relations to that centre. The local signs 
or tensions of the points in such a tangent vary 
in an unseizable progression; there is riolence in 
keeping to it, and the effect is forced. This makes 
the dry and stiff quality of an j long straight line, 
which the skilful Greeks avoided by the curves of 
their columns and entablatures, and the less eco- 
nomical barbarians by a profusion of interruptions 
and ornaments. 

The straight line, when made the direct object 
of attention, is, of course, followed by the eye 
and not seen by the outlying parts of the retina 
in one eccentric position. The same explanation 
is good for this more common case, since the 
consciousness that the eye travels in a straight 
line consists in the surviving sense of the pre- 
vious position, and in the manner in which the 
tensions of these various positions overlap. If 
the tensions change from moment to moment 
entirely, we have a broken, a fragmentary effect, 
as that of zigzag, where all is dropping and 
picking up again of associated motions; in the 
straight line, much prolonged, we have a grad- 
ual and inexorable rending of these tendencies 
to associated movements. 

In the curves we call flowing and graceful, we 
have, on the contrary, a more natural and rhyth- 
mical set of movements in the optic muscles; and 
certain points in the various gyrations make rhymes 
and assonances, as it were, to the eye that reaches 
them. We find ourselves at every turn reawaken- 



FORM 91 

lng, with a variation, the sense of the previous 
position. It is easy to understand by analogy 
with the superfioially observed conditions of pleas- 
ure, that snoh rhythms and harmonies should be 
delightful. The deeper question of the physical 
basis of pleasure we have not intended to disouss. 
Suffice it that measure, in quantity, in intensity, 
and in time, must involve that physiological proc- 
ess, whatever it may be, the consciousness of 
whioh is pleasure. 



$22. An important exemplification of 
these physiologioal principles is found in 
the charm of symmetry. When for any reason the 
eye is to be habitually directed to a single point, 
as to the opening of a gate or window, to an altar, 
a throne, a stage, or a fireplace, there will be vio* 
lenoe and distraction caused by the tendency to 
look aside in the recurring necessity of looking 
forward, if the object is not so arranged that 
the tensions of eye are balanced, and the centre 
of gravity of vision lies in the point whioh one is 
obliged to keep in sight. In all suoh objects we 
therefore require bilateral symmetry. The neces- 
sity of vertioal symmetry is not felt because the 
eyes and head do not so readily survey objects 
from top to bottom as from side to side. The 
inequality of the upper and lower parts does not 
generate the same tendency to motion, the same 
restlessness, as does the inequality of the right 
and left sides of an objeot in front of us. The 
eomf ort and economy that oomes from muscular 



92 THE SENSE OF BEAUTY 

balance in the eye, is therefore in some eases the 
source of the value of symmetry. 1 

In other cases symmetry appeals to us through 
the charm of recognition and rhythm. When the 
eye runs over a facade, and finds the objects 
that attract it at equal intervals, an expectation, 
like the anticipation of an inevitable note or 
requisite word, arises in the mind, and its non- 
satisfaction involves a shock. This shock, if 
caused by the emphatic emergence of an inter- 
esting object, gives the effect of the picturesque; 
but when it oomes with no compensation, it gives 
us the feeling of ugliness and imperfection — the 
defect which symmetry avoids. This kind of 
symmetry is accordingly in itself a negative merit, 
but often the condition of the greatest of all merits, 
— the permanent power to please. It contributes to 
that completeness which delights without stimulat- 
ing, and to which our jaded senses return gladly, 
after all sorts of extravagances, as to a kind of 
domestic peace. The inwardness and solidity of 
this quiet beauty comes from the intrinsic char- 
acter of the pleasure which makes it up. It is no 
adventitious charm; but the eye in its continual 
passage over the object finds always the same re- 
sponse, the same adequacy; and the very process 
of perception is made delightful by the object's 
fitness to be perceived. The parts, thus coales- 
cing, form a single object, the unity and simplicity 

* The relation to stability alio makes as sensitive to certain 
kinds of symmetry; bat this is an adrentitious consideration 
with which we are not concerned. 



FORM 98 

of which are based upon the rhythm and corre- 
spondence of its elements. 

Symmetry is here what metaphysicians call a 
principle of individuation. By the emphasis 
which it lays upon the recurring elements, it cuts 
up the field into determinate units; all that lies 
between the beats is one interval, one individual. 
If there were no recurrent impressions, no corre- 
sponding points, the field of perception would 
remain a fluid continuum, without defined and 
recognizable divisions. The outlines of most 
things are symmetrical because we choose what 
symmetrical lines we find to be the boundaries 
of objects. Their symmetry is the condition of 
their unity, and their unity of their individuality 
and separate existence. 

Experience, to be sure, can teach us to regard 
unsymmetrical objects as wholes, because their 
elements move and change together in nature; but 
this is a principle of individuation, a posteriori, 
founded on the association of recognized elements. 
These elements, to be recognized and seen to go 
together and form one thing, must first be some- 
how discriminated; and the symmetry, either of 
their parts, or of their position as wholes, may 
enable us to fix their boundaries and to observe 
their number. The category of unity, which we 
are so constantly imposing upon nature and its 
parts, has symmetry, then, for one of its instru- 
ments, for one of its bases of application. 

If symmetry, then, is a principle of individ- 
uation and helps us to distinguish objects, we 



M THE 8IN8B OF BEAUTY 

cannot wonder that it helps us to enjoy the per* 
ception. For our intelligence loves to perceive; 
water is not more grateful to a parched throat 
than a principle of comprehension to a confused 
understanding. Symmetry clarifies, and we all 
know that light is sweet. At the same time, we 
ean see why there are limits to the value of sym- 
metry. In objects, for instance, that are too 
small or too diffused for composition, symmetry 
has no value. In an avenue symmetry is stately 
and impressive, but in a large park, or in the plan 
of a city, or the side wall of a gallery it produoes 
monotony in the various views rather than unity 
in any one of them. Greek temples, never being 
very large, were symmetrical on all their facades; 
Gothic churches were generally designed to be sym- 
metrical only in the west front, and in the tran- 
septs, while the side elevation as a whole was 
eccentric. This was probably an accident, due to 
the demands of the interior arrangement} but it 
was a fortunate one, as we may see by contrasting 
its effect with that of our stations, exhibition 
buildings, and other vast structures, where sym- 
metry is generally introduced even in the most 
extensive facades which, being too much prolonged 
for their height, cannot be treated as units. The 
eye is not able to take them in at a glance, and 
does not get the effect of repose from the balance 
of the extremes, while the mechanical sameness of 
the sections, surveyed in succession, makes the 
impression of an unmeaning poverty of resource. 
Symmetry thus loses its value when it cannot, 



fOBM 96 

on account of the size of the object, contribute to 
the unity of our perception. The synthesis which 
it facilitates must be instantaneous. If the com- 
prehension by which we unify our object is discur- 
sive, as, for instance, in oonoeiving the arrangement 
and numbering of the streets of New York, or the 
plan of the Escurial, the advantage of symmetry is 
an intellectual one; we can better imagine the rela- 
tions of the parts, and draw a map of the whole in 
the fancy; but there is no advantage to direct per- 
ception, and therefore no added beauty. Sym- 
metry is superfluous in those objects. Similarly 
animal and vegetable forms gain nothing by being 
symmetrically displayed, if the sense of their life 
and motion is to be given. When, however, these 
forms are used for mere decoration, not for the 
expression of their own vitality, then symmetry it 
again required to accentuate their unity and organ- 
ization. This justifies the habit of convention- 
alizing natural forms, and the tendency of some 
kinds of hieratic art, like the Byzantine or Egyp- 
tian, to affect a rigid symmetry of posture. We 
can thereby increase the unity and force of the 
image without suggesting that individual life and 
mobility, which would interfere with the religious 
function of the object, as the symbol and embodi- 
ment of an impersonal faith. 

§ 23. Symmetry is evidently a kind form timing 
of unity in variety, where a whole is * fama * / * 1 '. 
determined by the rhythmic repetition of similars. 
We have seen that it has a value where it is an 



96 THE 8INSB OF BEAUTY 

aid tp unification. Unity would thus appear to be 
the virtue of forms; but a moment's reflection will 
show us that unity cannot be absolute and be a 
form; a form is an aggregation, it must have ele- 
ments, and the manner in which the elements are 
combined constitutes the character of the form. 
A perfeotly simple perception, in which there was 
no consciousness of the distinction and relation of 
parts, would not be a perception of form; it would 
be a sensation. Physiologically these sensations 
may be aggregates and their values, as in the case 
of musical tones, may differ according to the man- 
ner in which certain elements, beats, vibrations, 
nervous processes, or what not, are combined; but 
for consciousness the result is simple, and the 
value is the pleasantness of a datum and not of 
a process. Form, therefore, does not appeal to the 
unattentive; they get from objeots only a vague 
sensation which may in them awaken extrinsic 
associations; they do not stop to survey the parts 
or to appreciate their relation, and consequently 
are insensible to the various charms of various uni- 
fications; they can find in objects only the value 
of material or of function, not that of form. 

Beauty of form, however, is what specifically 
appeals to an aesthetic nature; it is equally re- 
moved from the crudity of formless stimulation 
and from the emotional looseness of reverie and 
discursive thought. The indulgence in sentiment 
and suggestion, of which our time is fond, to the 
sacrifice of formal beauty, marks an absence of 
cultivation as real, if not as confessed, as that 



of the barbarian who rerels in gorgeous con- 
fusion. 

The synthesis, then, which constitutes form is 
an activity of the mind; the unity arises con- 
sciously, and is an insight into the relation of 
sensible elements separately perceived. It differs 
from sensation in the consciousness of the synthe- 
sis, and from expression in the homogeneity of the 
elements, and in their common presence to sense. 

The variety of forms depends upon the character 
of the elements and on the variety of possible 
methods of unification. The elements may be all 
alike, and their only diversity be numerical. Their 
unity will then be merely the sense of their uni- 
formity. 1 Or they may differ in kind, but so as to 
compel the mind to no particular order in their 
unification. Or they may finally be so constituted 
that they suggest inevitably the scheme of their 
unity; in this case there is organization in the 
object, and the synthesis of its parts is one and 
pre-determinate. We shall discuss these various 
forms in succession, pointing out the effects proper 
to each. 

§ 31 The radical and typical case of *»«/**>«*/* 
the first kind of unity in variety is ***"""*• 
found in the perception of extension itself. This 
perception, if we look to its origin, may turn out 
to be primitive; no doubt the feeling of "crude 

* Cf . Fechner, Vorschule der Aetthetik, Erster Theil, S. 78, a 
passage by which the following classification of forms was first 
su ff t st sd. 



96 THE SENSE OF BEAUTY 

extensity" is an original sensation; every infer» 
ence, association, and distinction is a thing that 
looms up suddenly before the mind, and the nature 
and actuality of which is a datum of what — to 
indicate its irresistible immediacy and indesorib- 
ability — we may well call sense. Forms are seen, 
and if we think of the origin of the perception, we 
may well call this vision a sensation. The distinc- 
tion between a sensation of form, however, and one 
which is formless, regards the content and char- 
acter, not the genesis of the perception. A dis- 
tinction and association, or an inference, is a 
direct experience, a sensible fact; but it is the 
experience of a process, of a motion between two 
terms, and a consciousness of their coexistence and 
distinction; it is a feeling of relation. Now the 
sense of space is a feeling of this kind; the essence 
of it is the realization of a variety of directions and 
of possible motions, by which the relation of point 
to point is vaguely but inevitably given. The per- 
ception of extension is therefore a perception of 
form, although of the most rudimentary kind. It 
is merely Auseinandersein, and we might call it 
the materia prima of form, were it not capable of 
existing without further determination. For we 
can have the sense of space without the sense of 
boundaries; indeed, this intuition is what tempts 
us to declare space infinite. Space would have to 
consist of a finite number of juxtaposed blocks, if 
our experience of extension carried with it essen- 
tially the realization of limits. 
The cesthetio effect of extensiveness is also 



FORM 99 

entirely different from that of par ti cu l ar shapes* 
Some tilings appeal to us by their surfaces, others 
by the lines that limit those surfaces. And this 
effect of surface is not necessarily an effect of 
material or colour; the evenness, monotony, and 
vastness of a great curtain of colour produce an 
effect which is that of the extreme of uniformity 
in the extreme of multiplicity; the eye wanders 
over a fluid infinity of unrecognizable positions, and 
the sense of their numberlessness and continuity 
is precisely the source of the emotion of extent. 
The emotion is primary and has undoubtedly a 
physiological ground, while the idea of size is sec- 
ondary and involves associations and inferences. 
A small photograph of St. Peter's gives the idea 
of size; as does a distant view of the same object. 
But this is of course dependent on our realization 
of the distance, or of the scale of the representa- 
tion. The value of size becomes immediate only 
when we are at close quarters with the object; 
then the surfaces really subtend a large angle in 
the field of vision, and the sense of vastness estab- 
lishes its standard, which can afterwards be applied 
to other objects by analogy and contrast. There is 
also, to be sure, a moral and practical import in 
the known size of objects, which, by association, 
determines their dignity; but the pure sense of 
extension, based upon the attack of the object 
upon the apperceptive resources of the eye, is the 
truly aesthetic value which it concerns us to point 
out here, as the most rudimentary example of 
form* 



100 THE SENSE OF BEAUTY 

Although the effect of extension is not that of 
material, the two are best seen in conjunction. 
Material must appear in some form; but when its 
beauty is to be made prominent, it is well that this 
form should attract attention as little as possible 
to itself. Now, of all forms, absolute uniformity 
in extension is the simplest and most allied to the 
material; it gives the latter only just enough form 
to make it real and perceptible. Very rich and 
beautiful materials therefore do well to assume 
this form. You will spoil the beauty you have by 
superimposing another; as if you make a statue of 
gold, or flute a jasper column, or bedeck a velvet 
cloak. The beauty of stuffs appears when they are 
plain. Even stone gives its specific quality best in 
great unbroken spaces of wall ; the simplicity of the 
form emphasizes the substance. And again, the 
effect of extensity is never long satisfactory unless 
it is superinduced upon some material beauty; the 
dignity of great hangings would suffer if they were 
not of damask, but of cotton, and the vast smooth- 
ness of the sky would grow oppressive if it were 
not of so tender a blue. 

£xampt*of §25. Another beauty of the sky — 
tk*9Utr$. ^ e ster8 — g erg so striking and fasci- 
nating an illustration of the effect of multiplicity 
in uniformity, that I am tempted to analyze it at 
some length. To most people, I fancy, the stars 
are beautiful; but if you asked why, they would 
be at a loss to reply, until they remembered what 
they had heard about astronomy, and the great size 



FORM 101 

and distance and possible habitation of those orbs. 
The vague and illusive ideas thus aroused fall in 
so wdll with the dumb emotion we were already 
feeling, that we attribute this emotion to those 
ideas, and persuade ourselves that the power of 
the starry heavens lies in the suggestion of astro- 
nomical facts. 

The idea of the insignificance of our earth and 
of the incomprehensible multiplicity of worlds is 
indeed immensely impressive; it may even be 
intensely disagreeable. There is something baf- 
fling about 'infinity; in its presence the sense of 
finite humility can never wholly banish the rebel- 
lious suspicion that we are being deluded. Our 
mathematical imagination is put on the rack by an 
attempted conception that has all the anguish of a 
nightmare and probably, could we but awake, all 
its laughable absurdity. But the obsession of this 
dream is an intellectual puzzle, not an aesthetic 
delight. It is not essential to our admiration. 
Before the days of Kepler the heavens declared 
the glory of God; and we needed no calculation 
of stellar distances, no fancies about a plurality of 
worlds, no image of infinite spaces, to make the 
stars sublime. 

Had we been taught to believe that the stars 
governed our fortunes, and were we reminded of 
fate whenever we looked at them, we should simi- 
larly tend to imagine that this belief was the source 
of their sublimity; and, if the superstition were 
dispelled, we should think the interest gone from 
the apparition. But experience would soon undo- 



102 THE 8EN8B OF BEAUTY 

wire us; and prove to us that the sensuous char- 
acter of the object was sublime in itself. Indeed, 
on account of that intrinsic sublimity the sky can 
be fitly ohosen as a symbol for a sublime concep- 
tion; the common quality in both makes each sug- 
gest the other. For that reason, too, the parable 
of the natal stars governing our lives is such a 
natural one to express our subjection to circum- 
stances, and can be transformed by the stupidity 
of disciples into a literal tenet. In the same way, 
the kinship of the emotion produced by the stars 
with the emotion proper to certain religious mo- 
ments makes the stars seem a religious object. 
They become, like impressive music, a stimulus to 
worship. But fortunately there are experiences 
which remain untouched by theory, and which 
maintain the mutual intelligence of men through 
the estrangements wrought by intellectual and relig- 
ious systems. When the superstructures crumble, 
the common foundation of human sentience and 
imagination is exposed beneath. 

The intellectual suggestion of the infinity of 
nature can, moreover, be awakened by other expe- 
riences which are by no means sublime. A heap 
of sand will involve infinity as surely as a universe 
of suns and planets. Any object is infinitely 
divisible and, when we press the thought, can 
contain as many worlds with as many winged 
monsters and ideal republics as can the satellites 
of Sirius. But the infinitesimal does not move us 
mthetically; it can only awaken an amused curi- 
osity. The difference cannot lie in the import of the 



FORM 103 



idea, which is objectively the same in both < 
It lies in the different immediate effect of the crude 
images which give us the type and meaning of 
each; the crude image that underlies the idea of 
the infinitesimal is the dot, the poorest and most un- 
interesting of impressions; while the crude image 
that underlies the idea of infinity is space, multi- 
plicity in uniformity, and this, as we have seen, 
has a powerful effect on account of the breadth, 
volume, and omnipresence of the stimulation. 
Every point in the retina is evenly excited, and 
the local signs of all are simultaneously felt. This 
equable tension, this balance and elasticity in the 
very absence of fixity, give the vague but powerful 
feeling that we wish to describe. Did not the 
infinite, by this initial assault upon our senses, 
awe us and overwhelm us, as solemn music might, 
the idea of it would be abstract and moral like that 
of the infinitesimal, and nothing but an amusing 
curiosity. 

Nothing is objectively impressive; things are 
impressive only when they succeed in touching 
the sensibility of the observer, by finding the 
avenues to his brain and heart. The idea that the 
universe is a multitude of minute spheres circling, 
like specks of dust, in a dark and boundless void, 
might leave us cold and indifferent, if not bored 
and depressed, were it not that we identify this 
hypothetical scheme with the visible splendour, 
the poignant intensity, and the baffling number of 
the stars. So far is the object from giving value 
to the impression, that it is here, as it must 



104 THE SENSE OF BEAUTY 

always ultimately be, the impression that gives 
value to the object. For all worth leads us back 
to actual feeling somewhere, or else evaporates into 
nothing — into a word and a superstition. 

Now, the starry heavens are very happily de- 
signed to intensify the sensations on which their 
beauties must rest. In the first place, the con- 
tinuum of space is broken into points, numerous 
enough to give the utmost idea of multiplicity, and 
yet so distinct and vivid that it is impossible not 
to remain aware of their individuality. The vari- 
ety of local signs, without becoming organized into 
forms, remains prominent and irreducible. This 
makes the object infinitely more exciting than a 
plane surface would be. In the second place, the 
sensuous contrast of the dark background, — blacker 
the clearer the night and the more stars we can see, 
— with the palpitating fire of the stars themselves, 
could not be exceeded by any possible device. This 
material beauty adds incalculably, as we have 
already pointed out, to the inwardness and sub- 
limity of the effect. To realize the great impor- 
tance of these two elements, we need but to conceive 
their absence, and observe the change in the dignity 
of the result. 

Fancy a map of the heavens and every star 
plotted upon it, even those invisible to the naked 
eye: why would this object, as full of scientific 
suggestion surely as the reality, leave us so com- 
paratively cold? Quite indifferent it might not 
leave us, for I have myself watched stellar photo- 
graphs with almost inexhaustible wonder. The sense 



FORM 106 

of multiplicity is naturally in no way diminished 
by the representation; but the poignancy of the 
sensation, the life of the light, are gone; and with 
the dulled impression the keenness of the emotion 
disappears. Or imagine the stars, undiminished 
in number, without losing any of their astro- 
nomical significance and divine immutability, mar- 
shalled in geometrical patterns; say in a Latin 
cross, with the words In hoc signo vinces in a scroll 
around them. The beauty of the illumination 
would be perhaps increased, and its import, prac- 
tical, religious, and cosmic, would surely be a little 
plainer; but where would be the sublimity of the 
spectacle? Irretrievably lost: and lost because 
the form of the object would no longer tantalize 
us with its sheer multiplicity, and with the conse 
quent overpowering sense of suspense and awe. 

In a word, the infinity which moves us is the 
sense of multiplicity in uniformity. Accordingly 
things which have enough multiplicity, as the 
lights of a city seen across water, have an effect 
similar to that of the stars, if less intense; whereas 
a star, if alone, because the multiplicity is lacking, 
makes a wholly different impression. The single 
star is tender, beautiful, and mild; we can com- 
pare it to the humblest and sweetest of things: 

A violet by a mossy stone 
Half hidden from the eye, 
Fair as a star when only one 
Is shining in the sky. 

It is, not only in fact but in nature, an attendant 
on the moon, associated with the moon, if we may 



106 THE SENSE OF BEAUTY 

be so prosaic here, not only by contiguity bat also 
by similarity. 

Fairer than Phoebe's sapphire-regioned itar 
Or vesper, amorous glow-worm of the sky. 

The same poet can say elsewhere of a passionate 

lover: 

He arose 
Ethereal, flushed, and like a throbbing star, 
Amid the sapphire heaven's deep repose. 

How opposite is all this from the cold glitter, 
the cruel and mysterious sublimity of the stars 
when they are many! With these we have no 
Sapphic associations; they make us think rather 
of Eant who could hit on nothing else to compare 
with his categorical imperative, perhaps because 
he found in both the same baffling incomprehensi- 
bility and the same fierce actuality. Such ulti- 
mate feelings are sensations of physical tension. 

ityMtBof §26. This long analysis will be a 

rUctty. sufficient illustration of the power of 

multiplicity in uniformity; we may 
now proceed to point out the limitations inherent 
in this form. The most obvious one is that of 
monotony; a file of soldiers or an iron railing is 
impressive in its way, but cannot long entertain 
us, nor hold us with that depth of developing 
interest, with which we might study a crowd or 
a forest of trees. 

The tendency of monotony is double, and in two 
directions deadens our pleasure. When the re- 



FORM 107 

peated impressions are acute, and cannot be forgot- 
ten in their endless repetition, their monotony 
becomes painful. The constant appeal to the 
same sense, the constant requirement of the same 
reaction, tires the system, and we long for change 
as for a relief. If the repeated stimulations are 
not very acute, we soon become unconscious of 
them; like the ticking of the clock, they become 
merely a factor in our bodily tone, a cause, as the 
case may be, of a diffused pleasure or unrest; but 
they cease to present a distinguishable object. 

The pleasures, therefore, which a kindly but mo- 
notonous environment produces, often fail to make 
it beautiful, for the simple reason that the environ- 
ment is not perceived. Likewise the hideousness 
of things to which we are accustomed — the blem- 
ishes of the landscape, the ugliness of our clothes 
or of our walls — do not oppress us, not so much 
because we do not see the ugliness as because we 
overlook the things. The beauties or defects of 
monotonous objects are easily lost, because the ob- 
jects are themselves intermittent in consciousness. 
But it is of some practical importance to remark 
that this indifference of monotonous values is more 
apparent than real. The particular object ceases 
to be of consequence; but the congruity of its 
structure and quality with our faculties of percep- 
tion remains, and its presence in our environment 
is still a constant source of vague irritation and 
friction, or of subtle and pervasive delight. And 
this value, although not associated with the image 
of the monotonous object, lies there in our mind, 



108 THE SKNSR OF BEAUTY 

like all the vital and systemic feelings, ready to 
enhance the beauty of any object that arouses oui 
attention, and meantime adding to the health and 
freedom of our life — making whatever we do a 
little easier and pleasanter for us. A grateful 
environment is a substitute for happiness. It can 
quicken us from without as a fixed hope and affec- 
tion, or the consciousness of a right life, can quicken 
us from within. To humanize our surroundings is, 
therefore, a task which should interest the physi- 
cians both of soul and body. 

But the monotony of multiplicity is not merely 
intrinsic in the form; what is perhaps even of 
greater consequence in the arts is the fact that its 
capacity for association is restricted. What is in 
itself uniform cannot have a great diversity of 
relations. Hence the dryness, the crisp definite- 
ness and hardness, of those products of art which 
contain an endless repetition of the same elements. 
Their affinities are necessarily few; they are not 
fit for many uses, nor capable of expressing many 
ideas. The heroic couplet, now too much derided, 
is a form of this kind. Its compactness and inev- 
itableness make it excellent for an epigram and 
adequate it for a satire, but its perpetual snap and 
unvarying rhythm are thin for an epic, and impos- 
sible for a song. The Greek colonnade, a form in 
many ways analogous, has similar limitations. 
Beautiful with a finished and restrained beauty, 
which our taste is hardly refined enough to appre- 
ciate, it is incapable of development. The experi- 
ments of Roman architecture sufficiently show it; 



FORM 109 

the glory of which is their Roman frame rather 
than their Hellenic ornament. 

When the Greeks themselves had to face the 
problem of larger and more complex buildings, in 
the service of a supernatural and hierarchical sys- 
tem, they transformed their architecture into what 
we call Byzantine, and St. Sophia took the place 
of the Parthenon. Here a vast vault was intro- 
duced, the colonnade disappeared, the architrave 
was rounded into an arch from column to column, 
the capitals of these were changed from concave to 
convex, and a thousand other changes in structure 
and ornament introduced flexibility and variety. 
Architecture could in this way, precisely because 
more vague and barbarous, better adapt itself to 
the conditions of the new epoch. Perfect taste is 
itself a limitation, not because it intentionally 
excludes any excellence, but because it impedes 
the wandering of the arts into those bypaths of 
caprice and grotesqueness in which, although at 
the sacrifice of formal beauty, interesting partial 
effects might still be discovered. And this objec- 
tion applies with double force to the first crystalli- 
zations of taste, when tradition has carried us but 
a little way in the right direction. The authorized 
effects are then very simple, and if we allow no 
others, our art becomes wholly inadequate to the 
functions ultimately imposed upon it. Primitive 
arts might furnish examples, but the state of Eng- 
lish poetry at the time of Queen Anne is a suffi- 
cient illustration of this possibility. The French 
classicism, of which the English school was an 



110 THE SENSE OF BEAUTY 

echo, was more vital and human, because it em* 
bodied a more native taste and a wider training. 

fim!? 10 * ** § 27. It would be an error to suppose 
that aesthetic principles apply only to 
our judgments of works of art or of those natural 
objects which we attend to chiefly on account of 
their beauty. Every idea which is formed in the 
human mind, every activity and emotion, has some 
relation, direct or indirect, to pain and pleasure. 
If , as is the case in all the more important in- 
stances, these fluid activities and emotions pre' 
cipitate, as it were, in their evanescence certain 
psychical solids called ideas of things, then the 
concomitant pleasures are incorporated more or 
less in those concrete ideas and the things acquire 
an aesthetic colouring. And although this aesthetic 
colouring may be the last quality we notice in ob- 
jects of practical interest, its influence upon us is 
none the less real, and often accounts for a great 
deal in our moral and practical attitude. 

In the leading political and moral idea of our 
time, in the idea of democracy, I think there is a 
strong aesthetic ingredient, and the power of the 
idea of democracy over the imagination is an illus- 
tration of that effect of multiplicity in uniformity 
which we have been studying. Of course, nothing 
could be more absurd than to suggest that the 
French Eevolution, with its immense implica- 
tions, had an eesthetic preference for its basis; it 
sprang, as we know, from the hatred of oppres- 
sion, the rivalry of classes, and the aspiration 



FORM 111 

after a freer social and strictly moral organization. 
But when these moral forces were suggesting and 
partly realizing the democratic idea, this idea was 
necessarily vividly present to men's thoughts; the 
picture of human life which it presented was be- 
coming familiar ; and was being made the sanc- 
tion and goal of constant endeavour. Nothing so 
much enhances a good as to make sacrifices for it. 
The consequence was that democracy, prized at 
first as a means to happiness and as an instru- 
ment of good government, was acquiring an in- 
trinsic value; it was beginning to seem good in 
itself, in fact, the only intrinsically right and 
perfect arrangement. A utilitarian scheme was 
receiving an aesthetic xxmsecration. That which 
was happening to democracy had happened before 
to the feudal and royalist systems; they too had 
come to be prized in themselves, for the pleasure 
men took in thinking of society organized in such 
an ancient, and thereby to their fancy, appropriate 
and beautiful manner. The practical value of the 
arrangement, on which, of course, it is entirely 
dependent for its origin and authority, was for- 
gotten, and men were ready to sacrifice their wel- 
fare to their sense of propriety; that is, they 
allowed an aesthetic good to outweigh a practical 
one. That seems now a superstition, although, in- 
deed, a very natural and even noble one. Equally 
natural and noble, but no less superstitious, is our 
own belief in the divine right of democracy. Its 
essential right is something purely aesthetic. 
Such aesthetic love of uniformity, however, is 



113 THE SENSE OF BEAUTY 

usually disguised under some moral label: we call 
it the love of justice, perhaps because we hare not 
considered that the value of justice also, in so far 
as it is not derivative and utilitarian, must be 
intrinsic, or, what is practically the same thing, 
Aesthetic. But occasionally the beauties of democ- 
racy are presented to us undisguised. The writ- 
ings of Walt Whitman are a notable example. 
Never, perhaps, has the charm of uniformity in 
multiplicity been felt so completely and so exclu- 
sively. Everywhere it greets us with a passionate 
preference; not flowers but leaves of grass, not 
music but drum-taps, not composition but aggre- 
gation, not the hero but the average man, not the 
crisis but the vulgarest moment; and by this reso- 
lute marshalling of nullities, by this effort to show 
us everything as a momentary pulsation of a liquid 
and structureless whole, he profoundly stirs the 
imagination. We may wish to dislike this power, 
but, I think, we must inwardly admire it. For 
whatever practical dangers we may see in this 
terrible levelling, our aesthetic faculty can condemn 
no actual effect; its privilege is to be pleased 
by opposites, and to be capable of finding chaos 
sublime without ceasing to make nature beautiful. 

viu-of § 28. It is time we should return to 

fup§$ 0JHf 

m/iimo/ the consideration of abstract forms. 
utampiu. Nearest in nature to the example of 
uniformity in multiplicity, we found those objects, 
like a reversible pattern, that having some variety 
of parts invite us to survey them in different orders, 



FORM 113 

and so bring into play in a marked manner the fac- 
ulty of apperception. 

There is in the senses, as we have seen, a certain 
form of stimulation, a certain measure and rhythm 
of wares with which the aesthetic value of the sen- 
sation is connected. So when, in the perception of 
the object, a notable contribution is made by mem- 
ory and mental habit, the value of the perception 
will be due, not only to the pleasantness of the ex- 
ternal stimulus, but also to the pleasantness of the 
apperceptive reaction ; and the latter source of value 
will be more important in proportion as the object 
perceived is more dependent, for the form and mean- 
ing it presents, upon our past experience and imagi- 
native trend, and less on the structure of the external 
object. 

Our apperception of form varies not only with 
our constitution, age, and health, as does the ap- 
preciation of sensuous values, but also with our 
education and genius. The more indeterminate the 
object, the greater share must subjective forces have 
in determining our perception; for, of course, every 
perception is in itself perfectly specific, and can be 
called indefinite only in reference to an abstract 
ideal which it is expected to approach. Every 
cloud has just the outline it has, although we 
may call it vague, because we cannot classify its 
form under any geometrical or animal species; it 
would be first definitely a whale, and then would 
become indefinite until we saw our way to calling 
it a camel. But while in the intermediate stage, 
the cloud would be a form in the perception of 



114 THE SENSE OF BEAUTY 

which there would be little apperceptive activity, 
little reaction from the store of our experience, 
little sense of form; its value would be in its 
colour and transparency, and in the suggestion of 
lightness and of complex but gentle movement. 

But the moment we said "Yes, Terr like a 
whale," a new kind of value would appear; the 
cloud could now be beautiful or ugly, not as a 
cloud merely, but as a whale. We do not speak 
now of the associations of the idea, as with the sea, 
or fishermen's yarns; that is an extrinsic matter of 
expression. We speak simply of the intrinsic 
value of the form of the whale, of its lines, its 
movement, its proportion. This is a more or less 
individual set of images which are revived in the 
act of recognition; this revival constitutes the rec- 
ognition, and the beauty of the form is the pleasure 
of that revival. A certain musical phrase, as it 
were, is played in the brain; the awakening of that 
echo is the act of apperception and the harmony of 
the present stimulation with the form of that phrase ; 
the power of this particular object to develope and 
intensify that generic phrase in the direction ot 
pleasure, is the test of the formal beauty of this 
example. For these cerebral phrases have a cer- 
tain rhythm; this rhythm can, by the influence of 
the stimulus that now reawakens it, be marred or 
enriched, be made more or less marked and deli- 
cate; and as this conflict or reinforcement comes, 
the object is ugly or beautiful in form. 

Such an aesthetic value is thus dependent on two 
things. The first is the acquired character of the 



WOBSH 115 

apperceptive form evoked; it may be a cadenza or 
a trill, a major or a minor chord, a rose or a violet, 
a goddess or a dairy-maid; and as one or another of 
these is recognized, an aesthetic dignity and tone is 
given to the object. But it will be noticed that in 
such mere recognition very little pleasure is found, 
or, what is the same thing, different aesthetic types 
in the abstract have little difference in intrinsic 
beauty. The great difference lies in their affinities. 
What Will decide us to like or not to like the type of 
our apperception will be not so much what this type 
is, as its fitness to r the context of our mind. It is 
like a word in a poem, more effective by its fitness 
than by its intrinsic beauty, although that is requi- 
site too. We can be shocked at an incongruity of 
natures more than we can be pleased by the intrin- 
sic beauty of each nature apart, so long, that is, 
as they remain abstract natures, objects recognized 
without being studied. The aesthetic dignity of 
the form, then, tells us the kind of beauty we are 
to expect, affects us by its welcome or unwelcome 
promise, but hardly gives us a positive pleasure in 
the beauty itself. 

Now this is the first thing in the value of a form, 
the value of the type as such; the second and more 
important element is the relation of the particular 
impression to the form under which it is apper- 
ceived. This determines the value of the object as 
an example of its class. After our mind is pitched 
to the key and rhythm of a certain idea, say of 
a queen, it remains for the impression to fulfil, 
aggrandize, or enrich this form by a sympathetic 



116 THE SENSE OF BEAUTY 

embodiment of it. Then we have a queen that is 
truly royal. But if instead there is disappoint- 
ment, if this particular queen is an ugly one, 
although perhaps she might have pleased as a 
witch, this is because the apperceptive form and 
the impression give a cerebral discord. The ob- 
ject is unideal, that is, the novel, external element 
is inharmonious with the revived and internal ele- 
ment by suggesting which the object has been ap- 
perceived. 

Origin of f 29. A most important thing, there- 

****' fore, in the perception of form is the 

formation of types in our mind, with reference to 
which examples are to be judged. I say the forma- 
tion of them, for we cdn hardly consider the theory 
that they are eternal as a possible one in psychol- 
ogy. The Platonic doctrine on that point is a 
striking illustration of an equivocation we men- 
tioned in the beginning; 1 namely, that the import 
of an experience is regarded as a manifestation of 
its cause — the product of a faculty substituted for 
the description of its function. Eternal types are 
the instrument of aesthetic life, not its foundation. 
Take the aesthetic attitude, and you have for the 
moment an eternal idea; an idea, I mean, that you 
treat as an absolute standard, just as when you take 
the perceptive attitude you have an external object 
which you treat as an absolute existence. But the 
aesthetic, like the perceptive faculty, can be made 

* See Introduction, p. 12* 



FORM 117 

an object of study in turn, and its theory can be 
sought; and then the eternal idea, like the external 
object, is seen to be a product of human nature, a 
symbol of experience, and an instrument of thought. 

The question whether there are not, in external 
nature or in the mind of God, objects and eternal 
types, is indeed not settled, it is not even touched 
by this inquiry; but it is indirectly shown to be 
futile, because such transcendent realities, if they 
exist, can have nothing to do with our ideas of them. 
The Platonic idea of a tree may exist; how should I 
deny it? How should I deny that I might some day 
find myself outside the sky gazing at it, and feel- 
ing that I, with my mental vision, am beholding the 
plenitude of arboreal beauty, perceived in this world 
only as a vague essence haunting the multiplicity 
of finite trees? But what can that have to do 
with my actual sense of what a tree should be? 
Shall we take the Platonic myth literally, and say 
the idea is a memory of the tree I have already 
seen in heaven? How else establish any relation 
between that eternal object and the type in my 
mind? But why, in that case, this infinite varia- 
bility of ideal trees? Was the Tree Beautiful an 
oak, or a cedar, an English or an American elm? 
My actual types are finite and mutually exclusive; 
that heavenly type must be one and infinite. The 
problem is hopeless. 

Very simple, on the other hand, is the explana- 
tion of the existence of that type as a residuum of 
experience. Our idea of an individual thing is a 
compound and residuum of our several experiences 



118 THE SENSE OF BEAUTY 

of it; and .in the same manner our idea of a class 
is a compound and residuum of our ideas of the 
particulars that compose it. Particular impres- 
sions have, by virtue of their intrinsic similarity 
or of the identity of their relations, a tendency to 
be merged and identified, so that many individual 
perceptions leave but a single blurred memory that 
stands for them all, because it combines their sev- 
eral associations. Similarly, when various objects 
have many common characteristics, the mind is 
incapable of keeping them apart. It cannot hold 
clearly so great a multitude of distinctions and re- 
lations as would be involved in naming and con- 
ceiving separately each grain of sand, or drop of 
water, each fly or horse or man that we have ever 
seen. The mass of our experience has therefore to 
be classified, if it is to be available at all. Instead 
of a distinct image to represent each of our original 
impressions, we have a general resultant — a com- 
posite photograph — of those impressions. 

This resultant image is the idea of the class. It 
often has very few, if any, of the sensible proper- 
ties of the particulars that underlie it, often an 
artificial symbol — the sound of a word — is the 
only element, present to all the instances, which 
the generic image clearly contains. For, of course, 
the reason why a name can represent a class of 
objects is that the name is the most conspicuous 
element of identity in the various experiences of 
objects in that class. We have seen many horses, 
but if we are not lovers of the animal, nor particu- 
larly keen observers, very likely we retain no clear 



FORM 119 

image of all that mass of impressions except the 
reverberation of the sound " horse, " which really 
or mentally has accompanied all those impressions. 
This sound, therefore, is the content of our general 
idea, and to it cling all the associations which con- 
stitute our sense of what the word means. But a 
person with a memory predominantly visual would 
probably add to this remembered sound a more or 
less detailed image of the animal; some particular 
horse in some particular attitude might possibly be 
recalled, but more probably some imaginative con- 
struction, some dream image, would accompany the 
sound. An image which reproduced no particular 
horse exactly, but which was a spontaneous fiction 
of the fancy, would serve, by virtue of its felt 
relations, the same purpose as the sound itself. 
Such a spontaneous image would be, of course, 
variable. In fact, no image can, strictly speaking, 
ever recur. But these percepts, as they are called, 
springing up in the mind like flowers from the 
buried seeds of past experience, would inherit all 
the powers of suggestion which are required by 
any instrument of classification. 

These powers of suggestion have probably a cere- 
bral basis. The new percept — the generic idea — 
repeats to a great extent, both in nature and locali- 
zation, the excitement constituting the various orig- 
inal impressions; as the percept reproduces more or 
less of these it will be a more or less full and impar- 
tial representative of them. Not all the suggestions 
of a word or image are equally ripe. A generic idea 
or type usually presents to us a very inadequate and 



120 THE SENSE OF BEAUTY 

biassed view of the field it means to cover. As we 
reflect and seek to correct this inadequacy, the per- 
cept changes on our hands. The very consciousness 
that other individuals and other qualities fall under 
our concept, changes this concept, as a psychologi- 
cal presence, and alters its distinctness and extent. 
When I remember, to use a classical example, that 
the triangle is not isosceles, nor scalene, nor rec- 
tangular, but each and all of those, I reduce my 
percept to the word and its definition, with per- 
haps a sense of the general motion of the hand and 
eye by which we trace a three-cornered figure. 

Since the production of a general idea is thus a 
matter of subjective bias, we cannot expect that a 
type should be the exact average of the examples 
from which it is drawn. In a rough way, it is the 
average ; a fact that in itself is the strongest of argu- 
ments against the independence or priority of the 
general idea. The beautiful horse, the beautiful 
speech, the beautiful face, is always a medium be- 
tween the extremes which our experience has of- 
fered. It is enough that a given characteristic 
should be generally present in our experience, for 
it to become an indispensable element of the ideal. 
There is nothing in itself beautiful or necessary in 
the shape of the human ear, or in the presence of 
nails on the fingers and toes; but the ideal of man, 
which the preposterous conceit of our judgment 
makes us set up as divine and eternal, requires 
these precise details; without them the human 
form would be repulsively ugly. 

It often happens that the accidents of experience 



FORM 121 

make us in this way introduce into the ideal, ele- 
ments which, if they could be excluded without 
disgusting us, would make possible satisfactions 
greater than those we can now enjoy. Thus the 
taste formed by one school of art may condemn 
the greater beauties created by another. In morals 
we have the same phenomenon. A barbarous 
ideal of life requires tasks and dangers incom- 
patible with happiness; a rude and oppressed con- 
science is incapable of regarding as good a state 
which excludes its own acrid satisfactions. So, 
too, a fanatical imagination cannot regard God 
as just unless he is represented as infinitely cruel. 
The purpose of education is, of course, to free us 
from these prejudices, and to develope our ideals in 
the direction of the greatest possible good. Evi- 
dently the ideal has been formed by the habit of 
perception; it is, in a rough way, that average 
form which we expect and most readily apperceive. 
The propriety and necessity of it is entirely rela- 
tive to our experience and faculty of apperception. 
The shock of surprise, the incongruity with the 
formed percept, is the essence and measure of ug- 
liness. 

S 80. Nevertheless we do not form 7*t«wof« 
esthetic ideals any more than other thtdirtthn 
general types, entirely without bias. ofpi§a»ur§. 
We have already observed that a percept seldom 
gives an impartial compound of the objects of 
which it is the generic image. This partiality is 
due to a variety of circumstances. One is the un- 



132 THE SENS* OF BEAUTY 

equal accuracy of our observation. If some interest 
directs our attention to a particular quality of ob- 
jects, that quality will be prominent in our per- 
cept; it may eren be the only content clearly 
given in our general idea; and any object, how- 
ever similar in other respects to those of the given 
class, will -at once be distinguished as belonging 
to a different species if it lacks that characteristic 
on which our attention is particularly fixed. Our 
percepts are thus habitually biassed in the direction 
of practical interest, if practical interest does not 
indeed entirely govern their formation. In the 
same manner, our aesthetic ideals are biassed in the 
direction of aesthetic interest. Not all parts of an 
object are equally congruous with our perceptive 
faculty; not all elements are noted with the same 
pleasure. Those, therefore, which are agreeable 
are chiefly dwelt upon by the lover of beauty, and 
his percept will give an average of things with a 
great emphasis laid on that part of them which is 
beautiful. The ideal will thus deviate from the 
average in the direction of the observer's pleasure. 
For this reason the world is so much more beau- 
tiful to a poet or an artist than to an ordinary man. 
Each object, as his aesthetic sense is developed, is 
perhaps less beautiful than to the uncritical eye; 
his taste becomes difficult, and only the very best 
gives him unalloyed satisfaction. But while each 
work of nature and art is thus apparently blighted 
by his greater demands and keener susceptibility, 
the world itself, and the various natures it contains, 
art to him unspeakably beautiful. The more blem- 



FORM 123 

ishes he can see in men, the more excellence he sees 
in man, and the more bitterly he laments the fate 
of each particular soul, the more reverence and love 
he has for the soul in its ideal essence. Criticism 
and idealization involve each other. The habit of 
looking for beauty in everything makes us notice 
the shortcomings of things; our sense, hungry for 
complete satisfaction, misses the perfection it de- 
mands. But this demand for perfection becomes 
at the same time the nucleus of our observation; 
from every side a quick affinity draws what is beau- 
tiful together and stores it in the mind, giving body 
there to the blind yearnings of our nature. Many 
imperfect things crystallize into a single perfec- 
tion. The mind is thus peopled by general ideas 
in which beauty is the chief quality; and these 
ideas are at the same time the types of things. The 
type is still a natural resultant of particular im- 
pressions; but the formation of it has been guided 
by a deep subjective bias in favour of what has 
delighted the eye. 

This theory can be easily tested by asking 
whether, in the case where the ideal differs from 
the average form of objects, this variation is not 
due to the intrinsic pleasantness or impressiveness 
of the quality exaggerated. For instance, in the 
human form, the ideal differs immensely from the 
average. In many respects the extreme or some- 
thing near it is the most beautiful. Xenophon 
describes the women of Armenia as koXm ko! 
pcy<£\ou, and we should still speak of one as fair 
and tall and of another as fair but little. Size is 



124 THE SENSE OF BEAUTY 

therefore, even where least requisite, a thing in 
which the ideal exceeds the average. And the 
reason — apart from associations of strength — is 
that unusual size makes things conspicuous. The 
first prerequisite of effect is impression, and size 
helps that; therefore in the aesthetic ideal the aver- 
age will be modified by being enlarged, because that 
is a change in the direction of our pleasure, and size 
will be an element of beauty. 1 

Similarly the eyes, in themselves beautiful, will 
be enlarged also; and generally whatever makes by 
its sensuous quality, >by its abstract form, or by its 
expression, a particular appeal to our attention and 
contribution to our delight, will count for more in 
the ideal type than its frequency would warrant. 
The generic image has been constructed under the 
influence of a selective attention, bent upon aes- 
thetic worth. 

To praise any object for approaching the ideal of 
its kind is therefore only a roundabout way of speci- 
fying its intrinsic merit and expressing its direct 
effect on our sensibility. If in referring to the 
ideal we were not thus analyzing the real, the ideal 
would be an irrelevant and unmeaning thing. We 
know what the ideal is because we observe what 
pleases us in the reality. If we allow the general 
notion to tyrannize at all over the particular im- 
pression and to blind us to new and unclassified 

1 The contention of Burke that the beautif ul is small is doe 
to an arbitrary definition. By beautiful he means pretty and 
charming; agreeable as opposed to impressive. He only exag- 
gerates the then usual opposition of the beautiful to the sublime. 



FORM 126 

beauties which the latter may contain, we are sim- 
ply substituting words for feelings, and making a 
verbal classification pass for an aesthetic judgment. 
Then the sense of beauty is gone to seed. Ideals 
have their uses, but their authority is wholly rep- 
resentative. They stand for specific satisfactions, 
or else they stand for nothing at all. 

In fact, the whole machinery of our intelligence, 
our general ideas and laws, fixed and external ob- 
jects, principles, persons, and gods, are so many 
symbolic, algebraic expressions. They stand for 
experience; experience which we are incapable of 
retaining and surveying in its multitudinous im- 
mediacy. We should flounder hopelessly, like the 
animals, did we not keep ourselves afloat and direct 
our course by these intellectual devices. Theory 
helps us to bear our ignorance of fact. 

The same thing happens, in a way, in other 
fields. Our armies are devices necessitated by our 
weakness; our property an encumbrance required 
by our need. If our situation were not precarious, 
these great engines of death and life would not be 
invented. And our intelligence is such ahother 
weapon against fate. We need not lament the 
fact, since, after all, to build these various struct- 
ures is, up to a certain point, the natural function 
of human nature. The trouble is not that the 
products are always subjective, but that they are 
sometimes unfit and torment the spirit which they 
exercise. The pathetic part of our situation ap- 
pears only when we so attach ourselves to those 
necessary but imperfect fictions, as to reject the 



196 THB SENSE OF BEAUTY 

facts from which they spring and of which they 
seek to be prophetic. We are then guilty of that 
substitution of means for ends, which is called 
idolatry in religion, absurdity in logic, and folly 
in morals. In aesthetics the thing has no name, 
but is nevertheless very common; for it is found 
whenever we speak of what ought to please, rather 
than of what actually pleases. 

An ati thing* § 31. These principles lead to an in- 
bMMti ^ ll? telligible answer to a question which is 
not uninteresting in itself and crucial in a system 
of aesthetics. Are all things beautiful? Are all 
types equally beautiful when we abstract from our 
practical prejudices? If the reader has given his 
assent to the foregoing propositions, he will easily 
see that, in one sense, we must declare that no 
object is essentially ugly. If impressions are 
painful, they are objectified with difficulty; the 
perception of a thing is therefore, under normal 
circumstances, when the senses are not fatigued, 
rather agreeable than disagreeable. And when the 
frequent perception of a class of objects has given 
rise to an apperceptive norm, and we have an ideal 
of the species, the recognition and exemplification 
of that norm will give pleasure, in proportion to 
the degree of interest and accuracy with which we 
have made our observations. The naturalist ac- 
cordingly sees beauties to which the academic 
artist is blind, and each new environment must 
open to us, if we allow it to educate our percep- 
tion, a new wealth of beautiful forms. 



FORM 127 

But we are not for this reason obliged to assert 
that all gradations of beauty and dignity are a 
matter of personal and accidental bias. The mys- 
tics who declare that to God there is no distinction 
in the value of things, and that only our human 
prejudice makes us prefer a rose to an oyster, or 
a lion to a monkey, have, of course, a reason for 
what they say. If we could strip ourselves of our 
human nature, we should undoubtedly find our- 
selves incapable of making these distinctions, as 
well as of thinking, perceiving, or willing in any 
way which is now possible to us. But how things 
would appear to us if we were not human is, to 
a man, a question of no importance. Even the 
mystic to whom the definite constitution of his 
own mind is so hateful, can only paralyze with- 
out transcending his faculties. A passionate nega- 
tion, the motive of which, although morbid, is in 
spite of itself perfectly human, absorbs all his 
energies, and his ultimate triumph is to attain the 
absoluteness of indifference. 

What is true of mysticism in general, is true also 
of its manifestation in aesthetics. If we could so 
transform our taste as to find beauty everywhere, 
because, perhaps, the ultimate nature of things is 
as truly exemplified in one thing as in another, 
we should, in fact, have abolished taste altogether. 
For the ascending series of aesthetic satisfactions 
we should have substituted a monotonous judgment 
of identity. If things are beautiful not by virtue 
of their differences but by virtue of an identical 
something which they equally contain, then there 



128 THE SIN8K OF BKAUTT 

could be no discrimination in beauty. Like sub* 
stance, beauty would be everywhere one and the 
same, and any tendency to prefer one thing to 
another would be a proof of finitude and illusion. 
When we try to make our judgments absolute, 
what we do is to surrender our natural standards 
and categories, and slip into another genus, until 
we lose ourselves in the satisfying vagueness of 
mere being. 

Relativity to our partial nature is therefore 
essential to all our definite thoughts, judgments, 
and feelings. And when once the human bias is 
admitted as a legitimate, because for us a neces- 
sary, basis of preference, the whole wealth of nature 
is at once organized by that standard into a hier- 
archy of values. Everything is beautiful because 
everything is capable in some degree of interest- 
ing and charming our attention; but things differ 
immensely in this capacity to please us in the 
contemplation of them, and therefore they differ 
immensely in beauty. Gould our nature be fixed 
and determined once for all in every particular, the 
scale of ®sthetic values would become certain. We 
should not dispute about tastes, no longer because 
a common principle of preference could not be dis- 
covered, but rather because any disagreement would 
then be impossible. 

As a matter of fact, however, human nature is a 
vague abstraction; that which is common to all 
men is the least part of their natural endowment. 
iEsthetic capacity is accordingly very unevenly 
distributed; and the world of beauty is much vaster 



FORM 129 

and more complex to one man than to another. So 
long, indeed, as the distinction is merely one of 
development, so that we recognize in the greatest 
connoisseur only the refinement of the judgments 
of the rudest peasant, our aesthetic principle has 
not changed; we might say that, in so far, we had 
a common standard more or less widely applied. 
We might say so, because that standard would 
be an implication of a common nature more or less 
fully developed. 

But men do not differ only in the degree of their 
susceptibility, they differ also in its direction. 
Human nature branches into opposed and incom- 
patible characters. And taste follows this bifur- 
cation. We cannot, except whimsically, say that 
a taste for music is higher or lower than a taste 
for sculpture. A man might be a musician and a 
sculptor by turns; that would only involve a per- 
fectly conceivable enlargement in human genius. 
But the union thus effected would be an accumula- 
tion of gifts in the observer, not a combination of 
beauties in the object. The excellence of sculpt- 
ure and that of music would remain entirely inde- 
pendent and heterogeneous. Such divergences are 
like those of the outer senses to which these arts 
appeal. Sound and colour have analogies only in 
their lowest depth, as vibrations and excitement; 
as they grow specific and objective, they diverge; 
and although the same consciousness perceives 
them, it perceives them as unrelated and unoom- 
binable objects. 

The ideal enlargement of human capacity, there* 



130 THE SENSE OF BEAUTT 

fore, has no tendency to constitute a single stand- 
ard of beauty. These standards remain the 
expression of diverse habits of sense and imagi- 
nation. The man who combines the greatest range 
with the greatest endowment in each particular, 
will, of course, be the critic most generally re- 
spected. He will express the feelings of the 
greater number of men. The advantage of scope 
in criticism lies not in the improvement of our 
sense in each particular field; here the artist will 
detect the amateur's shortcomings. But no man 
is a specialist with his whole soul. Some latent 
capacity he has for other perceptions; and it is for 
the awakening of these, and their marshalling be- 
fore him, that the student of each kind of beauty 
turns to the lover of them all. 

The temptation, therefore, to say that all things 
are really equally beautiful arises from an imper- 
fect analysis, by which the operations of the 
SBsthetic consciousness are only partially disinte- 
grated. The dependence of the degrees of beauty 
upon our nature is perceived, while the dependence 
of its essence upon our nature is still ignored. All 
things are not equally beautiful because the subjec- 
tive bias that discriminates between them is the 
cause of their being beautiful at all. The princi- 
ple of personal preference is the same as that of 
human taste; real and objective beauty, in contrast 
to a vagary of individuals, means only an affinity 
to a more prevalent and lasting susceptibility, 
a response to a more general and fundamental de- 
mand. And the keener discrimination, by which 



HORM 151 

the distance between beautiful and ugly things is 
increased, far from being a loss of aesthetic insight, 
is a development of that faculty by the exercise 
of which beauty comes into the world. 

§32. It is the free exercise of the &*** of in- 
activity of apperception that gives so ©^TiaSdn. 
peculiar an interest to indeterminate 
objects, to the Vague, the incoherent, the sugges- 
tive, the variously interpretable. The more this 
effect is appealed to, the greater wealth of thought 
is presumed in the observer, and the less mastery 
is displayed by the artist. A poor and literal 
mind cannot enjoy the opportunity for reverie and 
construction given by the stimulus of indetermi- 
nate objects; it lacks the requisite resources. It 
is nonplussed and annoyed, and turns away to 
simpler and more transparent things with a feel- 
ing of helplessness often turning into contempt. 
And, on the other hand, the artist who is not artist 
enough, who has too many irrepressible talents 
and too little technical skill, is sure to float in 
the region of the indeterminate. He sketches and 
never paints; he hints and never expresses; he 
stimulates and never informs. This is the method 
of the individuals and of the nations that have 
more genius than art. 

The consciousness that accompanies this charac- 
teristic is the sense of profundity, of mighty sig- 
nificance. And this feeling is not necessarily an 
illusion. The nature of our materials — be they 
words, colours, or plastic matter — imposes a limit 



132 THE SENSE OF BEAUTY 

and bias upon our expression. The reality of 
experience can never be quite rendered through 
these media. The greatest mastery of technique 
will therefore come short of perfect adequacy 
and exhaustiveness; there must always remain a 
penumbra and fringe of suggestion if the most 
explicit representation is to communicate a truth. 
When there is real profundity, — when the living 
core of things is most firmly grasped, — there will 
accordingly be a felt inadequacy of expression, 
and an appeal to the observer to piece out our 
imperfections with his thoughts. But this should 
come only after the resources of a patient and 
well-learned art have been exhausted; else what is 
felt as depth is really confusion and incompetence. 
The simplest thing becomes unutterable, if we 
have forgotten how to speak. And a habitual in. 
dulgence in the inarticulate is a sure sign of the 
philosopher who has not learned to think, the poet 
who has not learned to write, the painter who has 
not learned to paint, and the impression that has 
not learned to express itself — all of which are 
compatible with an immensity of genius in the 
inexpressible soul. 

Our age is given to this sort of self-indulgence, 
and on both the grounds mentioned. Our public, 
without being really trained, — for we appeal to too 
large a public to require training in it, — is well 
informed and eagerly responsive to everything; it 
is ready to work pretty hard, and do its share 
towards its own profit and entertainment. It 
beoomes a point of pride with it to understand and 



FORM 133 

appreciate everything. And our art, in its turn, 
does not overlook this opportunity. It becomes 
disorganized, sporadic, whimsical, and experimen- 
tal. The crudity we are too distracted to refine, 
we accept as originality, and the vagueness we are 
too pretentious to make accurate, we pass off as 
sublimity. This is the secret of making great 
works on novel principles, and of writing hard 
books easily. 

S 88. An extraordinary taste for land- £****• *f 
scape compensates us for this ignorance l ** aM **' 
of what is best and most finished in the arts. The 
natural landscape is an indeterminate object; it 
almost always contains enough diversity to allow 
the eye a great liberty in selecting, emphasizing, 
and grouping its elements, and it is furthermore 
rich in suggestion and in vague emotional stimulus. 
A landscape to be seen has to be composed, and to 
be loved has to be moralized. That is the reason 
why rude or vulgar people are indifferent to their 
natural surroundings. It does not occur to them 
that the work-a-day world is capable of aesthetic 
contemplation. Only on holidays, when they add 
to themselves and their belongings some unusual 
ornament, do they stop to watch the effect. The 
far more beautiful daily aspects of their environ- 
ment escape them altogether. When, however, 
we learn to apperceive; when we grow fond of 
tracing lines and developing vistas; when, above 
all, the subtler influences of places on our mental 
tone are transmuted into an expressiveness in those 



134 THE 8ENSB OF BEAUTY 

places, and they are furthermore poetized by our 
day-dreams, and turned by our instant fancy into 
so many hints of a fairyland of happy living and 
yague adventure, — then we feel that the landscape 
is beautiful. The forest, the fields, all wild or 
rural scenes, are then full of companionship and 
entertainment. 

This is a beauty dependent on reverie, fancy, 
and objectified emotion. The promiscuous natural 
landscape cannot be enjoyed in any other way. It 
has no real unity, and therefore requires to have 
some form or other supplied by the fancy; which 
can be the more readily done, in that the possible 
forms are many, and the constant changes in the 
object offer varying suggestions to the eye. In 
fact, psychologically speaking, there is no such 
thing as a landscape; what we call such is an 
infinity of different scraps and glimpses given in 
succession. Even a painted landscape, although 
it tends to select and emphasize some parts of the 
field, is composed by adding together a multitude 
of views. When this painting is observed in its 
turn, it is surveyed as a real landscape would be, 
and apperceived partially and piecemeal ; although, 
of course, it offers much less wealth of material 
than its living original, and is therefore vastly 
inferior. 

Only the extreme of what is called impres- 
sionism tries to give upon canvas one absolute 
momentary view; the result is that when the 
beholder has himself actually been struck by that 
aspect, the picture has an extraordinary force and 



FORM 135 

emotional value — like the vivid power of recalling 
the past possessed by smells. But, on the other 
hand, such a work is empty and trivial in the 
extreme; it is the photograph of a detached im- 
pression, not followed, as it would be in nature, 
by many variations of itself. An object so unusual 
is often unrecognizable, if the vision thus unnatur- 
ally isolated has never happened to come vividly 
into our own experience. The opposite school — 
what might be called discursive landscape painting 
— collects so many glimpses and gives so fully the 
sum of our positive observations of a particular 
scene, that its work is sure to be perfectly intelli- 
gible and plain. If it seems unreal and uninter- 
esting, that is because it is formless, like the 
collective object it represents, while it lacks that 
sensuous intensity and movement which might 
have made the reality stimulating. 

The landscape contains, of course, innumerable 
things which have determinate forms; but if the 
attention is directed specifically to them, we have 
no longer what, by a curious limitation of the 
word, is called the love of nature. Not very long 
ago it was usual for painters of landscapes to intro- 
duce figures, buildings, or ruins to add some human 
association to the beauty of the place. Or, if wilct- 
ness and desolation were to be pictured, at least 
one weary wayfarer must be seen sitting upon a 
broken column. He might wear a toga and then 
be Marius among the ruins of Carthage. The land- 
scape without figures would have seemed meaning- 
less; the spectator would have sat in suspense 



1S6 THE SENSE OF BEAUTY 

awaiting something, as at the theatre when the 
curtain rises on an empty stage. The indetermi- 
nateness of the suggestions of an unhnmanized 
scene was then felt as a defect; now we feel it 
rather as an exaltation. We need to be free; our 
emotion suffices us; we do not ask for a descrip- 
tion of the object which interests us as a part of 
ourselves. We should blush to say so simple and 
obvious a thing as that to us "the mountains are 
a feeling"; nor should we think of apologizing for 
our romanticism as Byron did: 

I love not man the less but nature more 
From these our interviews, in which I steal, 
From all I may be, or have been before, 
To mingle with the universe, and feel 
What I can ne'er express. 

This ability to rest in nature unadorned and to 
find entertainment in her aspects, is, of course, a 
great gain. ^Esthetic education consists in train- 
ing ourselves to see the maximum of beauty. To 
see it in the physical world, which must continu- 
ally be about us, is a great progress toward that 
marriage of the imagination with the reality which 
is the goal of contemplation. 

While we gain this mastery of the formless, 
however, we should not lose the more necessary 
capacity of seeing form in those things which 
happen to have it. In respect to most of those 
things which are determinate as well as, natural, we 
are usually in that state of aesthetic unconscious- 
ness which the peasant is in in respect to the land- 



FORM 137 

scape. We treat human life and its environment 
with the same utilitarian eye with which he regards 
the field and mountain. That is beautiful which 
is expressive of convenience and wealth; the rest 
is indifferent. If we mean by love of nature 
aesthetic delight in the world in which we casually 
live (and what can be more natural than man and 
all his arts ?), we may say that the absolute love of 
nature hardly exists among us. What we love is 
the stimulation of our own personal emotions and 
dreams; and landscape appeals to us, as music does 
to those who have no sense for musical form. 

There would seem to be no truth in the saying 
that the ancients loved nature less than we. They 
loved landscape less — less, at least, in proportion 
to their love of the definite things it contained. 
The vague and changing effects of the atmosphere, 
the masses of mountains, the infinite and living 
complexity of forests, did not fascinate them. 
They had not that preponderant taste for the inde- 
terminate that makes the landscape a favourite 
subject of contemplation. But love of nature, and 
comprehension of her, they had in a most eminent 
degree; in fact, they actually made explicit that 
objectification of our own soul in her, which for 
the romantic poet remains a mere vague and shift- 
ing suggestion. What are the celestial gods, the 
nymphs, the fauns, the dryads, but the definite 
apperceptions of that haunting spirit which we 
think we see in the sky, the mountains, and the 
woods? We may think that our vague intuition 
grasps the truth of what their childish imagination 



138 THE SENSE OF BEAUTY 

turned into a fable. But our belief, if it is one, 
is just as fabulous, just as much a projection of 
human nature into material things; and if we 
renounce all positive conception of quasi-mental 
principles in nature, and reduce our moralizing of 
her to a poetic expression of our own sensations, 
then can we say that our verbal and illusive images 
are comparable as representations of the life of 
nature to the precision, variety, humour, and 
beauty of the Greek mythology? 

ixttmshnsto § 34. ft may no t be superfluous to 
m>t regarded mention here certain analogous fields 
**thrtoati 9 . w h ere th e human mind gives a series of 
unstable forms to objects in themselves indetermi- 
nate. 1 History, philosophy, natural as well as 
moral, and religion are evidently such fields. All 
theory is a subjective form given to an indetermi- 
nate material. The material is experience; and 
although each part of experience is, of course, per- 
fectly definite in itself, and just that experience 
which it is, yet the recollection and relating to- 
gether of the successive experiences is a function 



*When we speak of things definite in themselves, we of 
course mean things made definite by some human act of defi- 
nition. The senses are instruments that define and differen- 
tiate sensation ; and the result of one operation is that definite 
object upon which the next operation is performed. The mem- 
ory, for example, classifies in time what the senses may hare 
classified in space. We are nowhere concerned with objects 
other than objects of human experience, and the epithets, defi- 
nite and indefinite, refer necessarily to their relation to our 
Yarious categories of perception and comprehension. 



FORM 139 

of the theoretical faculty. The systematic rela- 
tions of things in time and space, and their 
dependence upon one another, are the work of our 
imagination. Theory can therefore never hare the 
kind of truth which belongs to experience; as 
Hobbes has it, no discourse whatsoever can end 
in absolute knowledge of fact. 

It is conceivable that two different theories 
should be equally true in respect to the saipe facts. 
All that is required is that they should be equally 
complete schemes for the relation and prediction 
of the realities they deal with. The choice between 
them would be an arbitrary one, determined by per- 
sonal bias, for the object being indeterminate, its 
elements can be apperceived as forming all kinds 
of unities. A theory is a form of apperception, 
and in applying it to the facts, although our first 
concern is naturally the adequacy of our instrument 
of comprehension, we are also influenced, more 
than we think, by the ease and pleasure with 
which we think in its terms, that is, by its beauty. 

The case of two alternative theories of nature, 
both exhaustive and adequate, may seem somewhat 
imaginary. The human mind is, indeed, not rich 
and indeterminate enough to drive, as the saying 
is, many horses abreast; it wishes to have one 
general scheme of conception only, under which 
it strives to bring everything. Yet the philoso- 
phers, who are the scouts of common sense, have 
come in sight of this possibility of a variety of 
methods of dealing with the same facts. As at 
the basis of evolution generally there are many 



140 THB 8ENSI OF BEAUTY 

variations, only some of which remain fixed, so at 
the origin of oonoeption there are many schemes; 
these are simultaneously developed, and at most 
stages of thought divide the intelligence among 
themselves. So much is thought of on one prin- 
ciple — say mechanically — and so much on another 
— say teleologically. In those minds only that 
have a speculative turn, that is, in whom the 
desire for unity of comprehension outruns prac- 
tical exigencies, does the conflict become intoler- 
able. In them one or another of these theories 
tends to swallow all experience, but is commonly 
incapable of doing so. 

The final victory of a single philosophy is not 
yet won, because none as yet has proved adequate 
to all experience. If ever unity should be attained, 
our unanimity would not indicate that, as the pop- 
ular fancy conceives it, the truth had been discov- 
ered; it would only indicate that the human mind 
had found a definitive way of classifying its ex- 
perience. Very likely, if man still retained his 
inveterate habit of hypostatizing his ideas, that 
definitive scheme would be regarded as a repre- 
sentation of the objective relations of things; but 
no proof that it was so would ever be found, nor 
even any hint that there were external objects, 
not to speak of relations between them. As the 
objects are hypostatized percepts, so the relations 
are hypostatized processes of the human under- 
standing. 

To have reached a final philosophy would be only 
to have formulated the typical and satisfying form 



FORM 141 

of human apperception; the view would remain a 
theory, an instrument of comprehension and survey 
fitted to the human eye; it would be for ever utterly 
heterogeneous from fact, utterly unrepresentative 
of any of those experiences which it would artifi- 
cially connect and weave into a pattern. Mythology 
and theology are the most striking illustrations of 
this human method of incorporating much diffuse 
experience into graphic and picturesque ideas; but 
steady reflection will hardly allow us to see any- 
thing else in the theories of science and philosophy. 
These, too, are creatures of our intelligence, and 
have their only being in the movement of our 
thought, as they have their only justification in 
their fitness to our experience. 

Long before we can attain, however, the ideal 
unification of experience under one theory, the 
various fields of thought demand provisional sur- 
veys; we are obliged to reflect on life in a variety 
of detached and unrelated acts, since neither can 
the whole material of life be ever given while we 
still live, nor can that which is given be impar- 
tially retained in the human memory. When 
omniscience was denied us, we were endowed with 
versatility. The picturesqueness of human thought 
may console us for its imperfection. 

History, for instance, which passes for the ac- 
count of facts, is in reality a collection of apper- 
ceptions of an indeterminate material; for even 
the material of history is not fact, but consists of 
memories and words subject to ever-varying inter- 
pretation. No historian can be without bias, 



143 THE SBKBE Of BSAUTT 



the bias defines the history. The mem- 
ory in the first place is selective; official and other 
reoords are selective, and often intentionally par- 
tial. Monuments and ruins remain by chance. 
And when the historian has set himself to study 
these few relics of the past, the work of his own 
intelligence begins. He must have some guiding 
interest. A history is not an indiscriminate 
register of every known event; a file of news- 
papers is not an inspiration of Clio. A history 
is a view of the fortunes of some institution or 
person; it traces the development of some inter- 
est This interest furnishes the standard by 
which the facts are selected, and their importance 
gauged. Then, after the facte are thus chosen, 
marshalled, and emphasized, comes the indication 
of causes and relations; and in this part of his 
work the historian plunges avowedly into specu- 
lation, and becomes a philosophical poet. Every- 
thing will then depend on his genius, on his 
principles, on his passions, — in a word, on his 
apperceptive forms. And the value of history is 
similar to that of poetry, and varies with the 
beauty, power, and adequacy of the form in which 
the indeterminate material of human life is pre- 
sented. 



| 85. The fondness of a race or epoch 
lwt for any kind of effect is a natural expres- 



sion of temperament and circumstances, 
and cannot be blamed or easily corrected. At the 
same time we may stop to consider some of the dir 



FORM 143 

advantages of a taste for the indeterminate. We 
shall be registering a truth and at the same time, 
perhaps, giving some encouragement to that rebel- 
lion which we may inwardly feel against this too 
prevalent manner. The indeterminate is by its 
nature ambiguous; it is therefore obscure and 
uncertain in its effect, and if used, as in many 
arts it often is, to convey a meaning, must fail 
to do so unequivocally. Where a meaning is not 
to be conveyed, as in landscape, architecture, or 
music, the illusiveness of the form is not so objec- 
tionable : although in all these objects the tendency 
to observe forms and to demand them is a sign of 
increasing appreciation. The ignorant fail to see 
the forms of music, architecture, and landscape, 
and therefore are insensible to relative rank and 
technical values in these spheres; they regard the 
objects only as so many stimuli to emotion, as 
soothing or enlivening influences. But the sensu- 
ous and associative values of these things — espe- 
cially of music — are so great, that even without 
an appreciation of form considerable beauty may 
be found in them. 

In literature, however, where the sensuous value 
of the words is comparatively small, indeterminate- 
ness of form is fatal to beauty, and, if extreme, 
even to expressiveness. For meaning is conveyed 
by the form and order of words, not by the words 
themselves, and no precision of meaning can be 
reached without precision of style. Therefore 
no respectable writer is voluntarily obscure in the 
structure of his phrases — that is an abuse reserved 



144 THE SENSE Or BEAUTY 

for the downs of literary fashion. But a book is 
a larger sentence, and if it is formless it fails to 
mean anything, for the same reason that an un- 
formed collection of words means nothing. The 
chapters and verses may have said something, as 
loose words may have a known sense and a tone; 
bat the book will have brought no message. 

In fact, the absence of form in composition has 
two stages: that in which, as in the works of 
Emerson, significant fragments are collected, and 
no system, no total thought, constructed out of 
them; and secondly, that in which, as in the writ- 
ings of the Symbolists of our time, all the sig- 
nificance is kept back in the individual words, or 
even in the syllables that compose them. This 
mosaic of word-values has, indeed, a possibility of 
effect, for the absence of form does not destroy 
materials, but, as we have observed, rather allows 
the attention to remain fixed upon them; and for 
this reason absence of sense is a means of accentu- 
ating beauty of sound and verbal suggestion. But 
this example shows how the tendency to neglect 
structure in literature is a tendenoy to surrender 
the use of language as an instrument of thought. 
The descent is easy from ambiguity to meaning- 
lessness. 

The indeterminate in form is also indeterminate 
in value. It needs completion by the mind of the 
observer and as this completion differs, the value 
of the result must vary. An indeterminate object 
is therefore beautiful to him who can make it so, 
and ugly to him who cannot. It appeals to a few. 



FORM 145 

and to them diversely. In fact, the observer's 
own mind is the storehouse from which the beau- 
tiful form has to be drawn. If the form is not 
there, it cannot be applied to the half-finished 
object; it is like asking a man without skill to 
complete another man's composition. The inde- 
terminate object therefore requires an active and 
well-equipped mind, and is otherwise without 
value. 

It is furthermore unprofitable even to the mind 
which takes it up; it stimulates that mind to 
action, but it presents it with no new object. 
We can respond only with those forms of apper- 
oeption which we already are aocustomed to. A 
formless object cannot inform the mind, cannot 
mould it to a new habit. That happens only when 
the data, by their clear determination, compel the 
eye and imagination to follow new paths and see 
new relations. Then we are introduced to a new 
beauty, and enriched to that extent. But the inde- 
terminate, like music to the sentimental, is a vague 
stimulus. It calls forth at random such ideas and 
memories as may lie to hand, stirring the mind, 
but leaving it undisciplined and unacquainted with 
any new object. This stirring, like that of the 
pool of Bethesda, may indeed have its virtue. A 
creative mind, already rich in experience and obser- 
vation, may, under the influence of such a stimu- 
lus, dart into a new thought, and give birth to that 
with which it is already pregnant; but the fertil- 
izing seed came from elsewhere, from study and 
admiration of those definite forms which nature 



146 THE SENSE OF BEAUTY 

contains, or which art, in imitation of nature, has 
conceived and brought to perfection. 

mmhnof | 88. The great advantage, then, of 

'iSShit^ indeterminate organization is that it cul- 
tivates that spontaneity, intelligence, 
and imagination without which many important 
objects would remain unintelligible, and because 
unintelligible, uninteresting. The beauty of land- 
scape, the forms of religion and science, the types 
of human nature itself, are due to this appercep- 
tive gift. Without it we should have a chaos; but 
its patient and ever-fresh activity carves out of the 
fluid material a great variety of forms. An object 
which stimulates us to this activity, therefore, 
seems often to be more sublime and beautiful than 
one which presents to us a single unchanging form, 
however perfect. There seems to be a life and 
infinity in the incomplete, which the determinate 
excludes by its own completeness and petrifaction. 
And yet the effort in this very activity is to reach 
determination; we can only see beauty in so far as 
we introduce form. The instability of the form 
can be no advantage to a work of art; the deter- 
minate keeps constantly what the indeterminate 
reaches only in those moments in which the ob- 
server's imagination is especially propitious. If 
we feel a certain disappointment in the monotonous 
limits of a definite form and its eternal, unsympa- 
thizing message, might we not feel much more the 
melancholy transiency of those glimpses of beauty 
which elude us in the indeterminate? Might not 



FORM 14T 

the torment and uncertainty of this contemplation, 
with the self-consciousness it probably involves, 
more easily tire us than the quiet companionship 
of a constant object? May we not prefer the 
unchangeable to the irrecoverable? 

We may; and the preference is one which we 
should all more clearly feel, were it not for an 
illusion, proper to the romantic temperament, 
which lends a mysterious charm to things which 
are indefinite and indefinable. It is the sugges- 
tion of infinite perfection. In reality, perfection 
is a synonym of finitude. Neither in nature nor 
in the fancy can anything be perfect except by 
realizing a definite type, which excludes all varia- 
tion, and contrasts sharply with every other possi- 
bility of being. There is no perfection apart from 
a form of apperception or type; and there are as 
many kinds of perfection as there are types or 
forms of apperception latent in the mind. 

Now these various perfections are mutually 
exclusive. Only in a kind of aesthetic orgy — in 
the madness of an intoxicated imagination — can 
we confuse them. As the Roman emperor wished 
that the Roman people had but a single neck, to 
murder them at one blow, so we may sometimes 
wish that all beauties had but one form, that we 
might behold them together. But in the nature of 
things beauties are incompatible. The spring can- 
not coexist with the autumn, nor day with night; 
what is beautiful in a child is hideous in a man, 
and vice verm; every age, every country, each sex, 
has a peculiar beauty, finite and incommunicable; 



MS ns am or bbautt 

the better it is attained the more completely it 
excludes every other. The same is evidently tone 
of schools of art, of styles and languages, and of 
erery effect whatsoever. It exists by its finitode 
and is great in propor ti on to its determination. 

Bat there is a loose and somewhat helpless state 
of mind in which while we are incapable of realiz- 
ing any particular thought or vision in its perfect 
clearness and absolute beauty, we nevertheless feel 
its haunting presence in the background of con- 
sciousness. And one reason why the idea cannot 
emerge from that obscurity is that it is not alone 
in the brain; a thousand other ideals, a thousand 
other plastic tendencies of thought, simmer there 
in confusion; and if any definite image is presented 
in response to that vague agitation of our soul, we 
feel its inadequacy to our need in spite of, or per- 
haps on account of, its own particular perfection. 
We then say that the classic does not satisfy us, 
and that the "Grecian cloys us with his perfect- 
nets." We are not capable of that concentrated 
and serious attention to one thing at a time which 
would enable us to sink into its being, and enjoy 
the intrinsic harmonies of its form, and the bliss 
of its immanent particular heaven; we flounder in 
the vague, but at the same time we are full of 
yearnings, of half -thoughts and semi-visions, and 
the upward tendency and exaltation of our mood 
is emphatic and overpowering in proportion to our 
incapacity to think, speak, or imagine. 

The sum of our incoherences has, however, an 
imposing volume and even, perhaps, a vague, gen* 



WOBM 149 

eral direction- We feel ourselves laden with aa 
infinite burden; and what delights us most and 
seems to us to oome nearest to the ideal is not 
what embodies any one possible form, but that 
which, by embodying none, suggests many, and 
stirs the mass of our inarticulate imagination with 
a pervasive thrill. Each thing, without being a 
beauty in itself, by stimulating our indeterminate 
emotion, seems to be a hint and expression of 
infinite beauty. That infinite perfection which 
cannot be realized, because it is self -contradictory, 
may be thus suggested, and on account of this 
suggestion an indeterminate effect may be regarded 
as higher, more significant, and more beautiful 
than any determinate one. 

The illusion, however, is obvious. The infinite 
perfection suggested is an absurdity. What exists 
is a vague emotion, the objects of which, if they 
could emerge from the chaos of a confused imagi- 
nation, would turn out to be a multitude of differ- 
ently beautiful determinate things. This emotion 
of infinite perfection is the materia prima — rudi$ 
indigestaque mole* — out of which attention, inspi- 
ration, and art can bring forth an infinity of partic- 
ular perfections. Every Aesthetic success, whether 
in contemplation or production, is the birth of one 
of these possibilities with which the sense of infi- 
nite perfection is pregnant. A work of art or an 
act of observation which remains indeterminate is, 
therefore, a failure, however much it may stir our 
emotion. It is a failure for two reasons. In the 
first place this emotion is seldom wholly pleasant; 



ISO THE SENSE OF BEAUTY 

it is disquieting and perplexing; it brings a desire 
rather than a satisfaction. And in the second 
place, the emotion, not being embodied, fails to 
constitute the beauty of anything; and what we 
have is merely a sentiment, a consciousness that 
values are or might be there, but a failure to extri- 
cate those values, or to make them explicit and 
recognizable in an appropriate object. 

These gropings after beauty have their worth as 
•igns of aesthetic vitality and intimations of future 
possible accomplishment; but in themselves they 
are abortive, and mark the impotence of the 
imagination. Sentimentalism in the observer and 
romanticism in the artist are examples of this 
mthetio incapacity. Whenever beauty is really 
seen and loved, it has a definite embodiment: the 
eye has precision, the work has style, and the 
object has perfection. The kind of perfection 
may indeed be new; and if the discovery of new 
perfections is to be called romanticism, then 
romanticism is the beginning of all aesthetio life. 
But if by romanticism we mean indulgence in con- 
fused suggestion and in the exhibition of turgid 
force, then there is evidently need of education, of 
attentive labour, to disentangle the beauties so 
vaguely felt, and give each its adequate embodi- 
ment. The breadth of our inspiration need not be 
lost in this process of clarification, for there is no 
limit to the number and variety of forms which 
the world may be made to wear; only, if it is to 
be appreciated as beautiful and not merely felt as 
unutterable, it must be seen as a kingdom of forms. 



FORM 151 

Thus the works of Shakespere give us a great vari 
ety, with a frequent marvellous precision of char- 
acterization, and the forms of his art are definite 
although its scope is great. 

But by a curious anomaly, we are often expected 
to see the greatest expressiveness in what remains 
indeterminate, and in reality expresses nothing. 
As we have already observed, the sense of pro- 
fundity and significance is a very detachable 
emotion; it can accompany a confused jumble of 
promptings quite as easily as it can a thorough 
comprehension of reality. The illusion of infinite 
perfection is peculiarly apt to produce this sensa- 
tion. That illusion arises by the simultaneous 
awakening of many incipient thoughts and dim 
ideas; it stirs the depths of the mind as a wind 
stirs the thickets of a forest; and the unusual 
consciousness of the life and longing of the soul, 
brought by that gust of feeling, makes us reoog* 
nize in the object a singular power, a mysterious 
meaning. 

But the feeling of significance signifies little. 
All we have in this case is a potentiality of imagi- 
nation; and only when this potentiality begins to 
be realized in definite ideas, does a real meaning, 
or any object which that meaning can mean, arise 
in the mind. The highest aesthetic good is not 
that vague potentiality, nor that contradictory, 
infinite perfection so strongly desired; it is the 
greatest number and variety of finite perfections. 
To learn to see in nature and to enshrine in the 
arts the typical forms of things; to study and 



112 THE 8EN8E OF BEAUTY 

recognize their variations; to domesticate the im- 
agination in the world, so that everywhere beauty 
can be seen, and a hint found for artistic creation, 
— that is the goal of contemplation. Progress lies 
in the direction of discrimination and precision, 
not in that of formless emotion and reverie. 

orgmiM* § 87. The form of the material world 

9onr<f of op- is in one sense always perfectly definite, 
ftomlr'Tx- si 1106 the particles that compose it are 
QMpteof at each moment in a given relative posi- 
•eutpturt. ^. Qn ^ but a world that had no other form 
than that of such a constellation of atoms would 
remain chaotic to our perception, because we should 
not be able to survey it as a whole, or to keep our 
attention suspended evenly over its innumerable 
parts. According to evolutionary theory, mechan- 
ical necessity has, however, brought about a distri- 
bution and aggregation of elements such as, for our 
purposes, constitutes individual things. Certain 
systems of atoms move together as units; and these 
organisms reproduce themselves and recur so often 
in our environment, that our senses become accus- 
tomed to view their parts together. Their form 
becomes a natural and recognizable one. An order 
and sequence is established in our imagination by 
virtue of the order and sequence in which the cor- 
responding impressions have come to our senses. 
We can remember, reproduce, and in reproducing 
vary, by kaleidoscopic tricks of the fancy, the forms 
in which our perceptions have come. 
The mechanical organization of external nature is 



roBM 153 

thus the source of apperceptive forms in the mind. 
Did not sensation, bj a constant repetition of cer- 
tain sequences, and a recurring exactitude of 
mathematical relations, keep our fancy clear and 
fresh, we should fall into an imaginative lethargy. 
Idealization would degenerate into indistinctness, 
and, by the dulling of our memory, we should dream 
a world daily more poor and vague. 
* This process is periodically observable in the 
history of the arts. The way in which the human 
figure, for instance, is depicted, is an indication of 
the way in which it is apperceived. The arts give 
back only so much of nature as the human eye has 
been able to master. The most primitive stage of 
drawing and sculpture presents man with his arms 
and legs, his ten fingers and ten toes, branching out 
into mid-air; the apperception of the body has been 
evidently practical and successive, and the artist 
sets down what he knows rather than any of the 
particular perceptions that conveyed that knowl- 
edge. Those perceptions are merged and lost in 
the haste to reach the practically useful concept of 
the object. By a naive expression of the same prin- 
ciple, we find in some Assyrian drawings the eye 
seen from the front introduced into a face seen in 
profile, each element being represented in that form 
in which it was most easily observed and remem- 
bered. The development of Greek sculpture fur- 
nishes a good example of the gradual penetration 
of nature into the mind, of the slowly enriched 
apperception of the object. The quasi-Egyptian 
stiffness melts away, first from the bodies of the 



164 THE SENSE OF BEAUTY 

minor figures, afterwards of those of the gods, and 
finally the face is varied, and the hieratic smile 
almost disappears. 1 

But this progress has a near limit; once the most 
beautiful and inclusive apperception reached, onoe 
the best form caught at its best moment, the artist 
seems to have nothing more to do. To reproduce 
the imperfections of individuals seems wrong, when 
beauty, after all, is the thing desired. And the 
ideal, as caught by the master's inspiration, is 
more beautiful than anything his pupils can find 
for themselves in nature. From its summit, the 
art therefore declines in one of two directions. 
It either becomes academic, forsakes the study of 
nature, and degenerates into empty convention, or 
else it becomes ignoble, forsakes beauty, and sinks 
into a tasteless and unimaginative technique. The 
latter was the course of sculpture in ancient times, 
the former, with moments of reawakening, has been 
its dreadful fate among the moderns. 

This reawakening has come whenever there has 
been a return to nature, for a new form of apper- 
ception and a new ideal. Of this return there is 
continual need in all the arts ; without it our apper- 
ceptions grow thin and worn, and subject to the 
sway of tradition and fashion. We continue to 
judge about beauty, but we give up looking for it. 

1 In the JSgina marbles the wounded and dying warriors still 
wear this Buddha-like expression: their bodies, although con- 
ventional, show a great progress in observation, compared with 
the impossible Athena in the centre with her sacred feet in 
Egyptian profile and her owl-like visage. 



FORM 166 

The remedy is to go back to the reality, to study 
it patiently, to allow new aspects of it to work upon 
the mind, sink into it, and Beget there an imagina- 
tive offspring after their own kind. Then a new art 
can appear, which, having the same origin in admi- 
ration for nature which the old art had, may hope 
to attain the same excellence in a new direction. 

In fact, one of the dangers to which a modern 
artist is exposed is the seduction of his prede- 
cessors. The gropings of our muse, the distracted 
experiments of our architecture, often arise from 
the attraction of some historical school; we can- 
not work out our own style because we are ham- 
pered by the beauties of so many others. The result 
is an eclecticism, which, in spite of its great histori- 
cal and psychological interest, is without aesthetic 
unity or permanent power to please. Thus the 
study of many schools of art may become an obsta- 
cle to proficiency in any. 

§ 88. Utility (or, as it is now called, vtun*th* 
adaptation, and natural selection) or- Organization 
ganizes the material world into definite ln *«**•> 
species and individuals. Only certain aggregations 
of matter are in equilibrium with the prevailing 
forces of the environment. Gravity, for instance, 
is in itself a chaotic force; it pulls all particles 
indiscriminately together without reference to the 
wholes into which the human eye may have grouped 
them. But the result is not chaos, because matter 
arranged in some ways is welded together by the 
very tendency which disintegrates it when ar- 



156 the sense or beauty 

ranged in other forms. These forms, selected by 
their oongruity with gravity, are therefore fixed in 
nature, and become types. Thus the weight of the 
stones keeps the pyramid standing: here a certain 
shape has become a guarantee of permanence in the 
presence of a force in itself mechanical and undis- 
criminating. It is the utility of the pyramidal 
form— -its fitness to stand — that has made it a 
type in building. The Egyptians merely repeated 
a process that they might have observed going on of 
itself in nature, who builds a pyramid in every hill, 
not indeed because she wishes to, or because pyra- 
mids are in any way an object of her action, but 
because she has no force which can easily dislodge 
matter that finds itself in that shape. 

Such an accidental stability of structure is, in this 
moving world, a sufficient principle of permanenoe 
and individuality. The same mechanical principles, 
in more complex applications, insure the persistence 
of animal forms and prevent any permanent devia- 
tion from them. What is called the principle of 
self-preservation, and the final causes and sub- 
stantial forms of the Aristotelian philosophy, are 
descriptions of the result of this operation. The 
tendency of everything to maintain and propagate 
its nature is simply the inertia of a stable juxtapo- 
sition of elements, which are not enough disturbed 
by ordinary accidents to lose their equilibrium; 
while the incidence of a too great disturbance 
causes that disruption we call death, or that varia- 
tion of type, which, on account of its incapacity 
to establish itself permanently, we call abnormal. 



FORM 167 

Nature thus organizes herself into recognizable 
species; and the aesthetic eye, studying her forms, 
tends, as we hare already shown, to bring th4 type 
within even narrower limits than do the external 
exigencies of life. 

§ 39. This natural harmony between n§ ntauom of 
utility and beauty, when its origin is ff^ to 
not understood, is of course the subject 
of much perplexed and perplexing theory. Some- 
times we are told that utility is itself the essence 
of beauty, that is, that our consciousness of the 
practical advantages of certain forms is the ground 
of our aesthetic admiration of them. The horse's 
legs are said to be beautiful because they are fit to 
run, the eye because it is made to see, the house 
because it is convenient to live in. An amusing 
application — which might pass for a reduotio ad 
abmrdum — of this dense theory is put by Xeno- 
phon into the mouth of Socrates. Comparing him- 
self with a youth present at the same banquet, who 
was about to receive the prize of beauty, Socrates 
declares himself more beautiful and more worthy 
of the crown. For utility makes beauty, and eyes 
bulging out from the head like his are the most 
advantageous for seeing; nostrils wide and open 
to the air, like his, most appropriate for smell; 
and a mouth large and voluminous, like his, best 
fitted for both eating and kissing. 1 

Now since these things are, in fact, hideous, the 
theory that shows they ought to be beautiful, is 

1 Symposium of Xtnophon, V. 



108 THB SENSE OF BEAUTY 

Tain and ridiculous. But that theory contains this 
truth: that had the utility of Sooratio features been 
so great that men of all other type must have per* 
ished, Socrates would have been beautiful. He 
would have represented the human type. The eye 
would have been then accustomed to that form, the 
imagination would have taken it as the basis of its 
refinements, and accentuated its naturally effective 
points. The beautiful does not depend on the use- 
ful; it is constituted by the imagination in igno- 
rance and contempt of practical advantage ; but it is 
not independent of the necessary, for the necessary 
must also be the habitual and consequently the basis 
of the type, and of all its imaginative variations. 

There are, moreover, at a late and derivative stage 
in our asthetic judgment, certain oases in which the 
knowledge of fitness and utility enters into our 
sense of beauty. But it does so very indirectly, 
rather by convincing us that we should tolerate 
what practical conditions have imposed on an 
artist, by arousing admiration of his ingenuity, or 
by suggesting the interesting things themselves 
with which the object is known to be connected. 
Thus a cottage-chimney, stout and tall, with the 
smoke floating from it, pleases because we fancy 
it to mean a hearth, a rustic meal, and a comfort- 
able family. But that is all extraneous association. 
The most ordinary way in which utility affects us 
is negatively; if we know a thing to be useless 
and fictitious, the uncomfortable haunting sense of 
waste and trickery prevents all enjoyment, and 
therefore banishes beauty. But this is also an 



FORM 169 

adventitious oomplioation. The intrinsic value of 
a form is in no way affected by it. 

Opposed to this utilitarian theory stands the 
metaphysical one that would make the beauty or 
intrinsic rightness of things the source of their 
efficiency and of their power to survive. Taken 
literally, as it is generally meant, this idea must, 
from our point of view, appear preposterous. 
Beauty and rightness are relative to our judgment 
and emotion; they in no sense exist in nature or 
preside over her. She everywhere appears to move 
by mechanical law. The types of things exist by 
what, in relation to our approbation, is mere chance, 
and it is our faculties that must adapt themselves 
to our environment and not our environment to our 
faculties. Such is the naturalistic point of view 
which we have adopted. 

To say, however, that beauty is in some sense 
the ground of practical fitness, need not seem to us 
wholly unmeaning. The fault of the Platonists 
who say things of this sort is seldom that of empti- 
ness. They have an intuition; they have some- 
times a strong sense of the facts of consciousness. 
But they turn their discoveries into so many reve* 
lations, and the veil of the infinite and absolute 
soon covers their little light of specific truth. 
Sometimes, after patient digging, the student comes 
upon the treasure of some simple fact, some com- 
mon experience, beneath all their mystery and unc- 
tion. And so it may be in this case. If we make 
allowances for the tendency to express experience 
in allegory and myth, we shall see that the idea 



100 THE 8KN8E OF BEAUTY 

of beauty and rationality presiding over nature 
and guiding her, as it were, for their own greater 
glory^ is a projection and a writing large of a psy- 
chological principle. 

The mind that perceives nature is the same that 
understands and enjoys her; indeed, these three 
functions are really elements of one process. There 
is therefore in the mere perceptibility of a thing a 
certain prophecy of its beauty; if it were not on 
the road to beauty, if it had no approach to fitness 
to our faculties of perception, the object would 
remain eternally unperceived. The sense, there- 
fore, that the whole world is made to be food for 
the soul; that beauty is not only its own, but all 
things 1 excuse for being; that universal aspiration 
towards perfection is the key and secret of the 
world, — that sense is the poetical reverberation of 
a psychological fact — of the fact that our mind is 
an organism tending to unity, to unconsciousness 
of what is refractory to its action, and to assimila- 
tion and sympathetic transformation of what is 
kept within its sphere. The idea that nature could 
be governed by an aspiration towards beauty is, 
therefore, to be rejected as a confusion, but at the 
same time we must confess that this confusion is 
founded on a consciousness of the subjective rela- 
tion between the perceptibility, rationality, and 
beauty of things. 

ututtg tt# $ 40. This subjective relation is, how- 

^'mSt^SL eTer ' excee( *ingly loose. Most things 
*(*•«*•. that are perceivable are not perceived 



FORM 161 

so distinctly as to be intelligible, nor to delight- 
fully as to be beautiful. If our eye had infinite 
penetration, or our imagination infinite elasticity, 
this would not be the ease; to see would then be 
to understand and to enjoy. As it is, the degree 
of determination needed for perception is much 
less than that needed for comprehension or ideality. 
Hence there is room for hypothesis and for art. As 
hypothesis organizes experiences imaginatively in 
ways in which observation has not been able to do, 
so art organizes objects in ways to which nature, 
perhaps, has never condescended. 

The chief thing which the imitative arts add to 
nature is permanence, the lack of which is the 
saddest defect of many natural beauties. The 
forces which determine natural forms, therefore, 
determine also the forms of the imitative arts. 
But the non-imitative arts supply organisms dif- 
ferent in kind from those which nature affords. 
If we seek the principle by which these objects are 
organized, we shall generally find that it is like- 
wise utility. Architecture, for instance, has all 
its forms suggested by practical demands. Use 
requires our buildings to assume certain determi- 
nate forms; the mechanical properties of our mate- 
rials, the exigency of shelter, light, accessibility, 
economy, and convenience, dictate the arrange* 
ments of our buildings. 

Houses and temples have an evolution like that 
of animals and plants. Various forms arise by 
mechanical necessity, like the cave, or the shelter 
of overhanging boughs. These are perpetuated by 



162 THE SENSE OF BEAUTY 

a selection in which the needs and pleasures of 
man are the environment to which the structure 
must be adapted. Determinate forms thus estab- 
lish themselves, and the eye becomes accustomed 
to them. The line of use, bj habit of appercep- 
tion, becomes the line of beauty. A striking 
example may be found in the pediment of the 
Greek temple and the gable of the northern house. 
The exigencies of climate determine these forms 
differently, but the eye in each case accepts what 
utility imposes. We admire height in one and 
breadth in the other, and we soon find the steep 
pediment heavy and the low gable awkward and 
mean. 

It would be an error, however, to conclude that 
habit alone establishes the right proportion in 
these various types of building. We have the 
same intrinsic elements to consider as in natural 
forms. That is, besides the unity of type and cor- 
respondence of parts which custom establishes, 
there are certain appeals to more fundamental 
susceptibilities of the human eye and imagina- 
tion. There is, for instance, the value of abstract 
form, determined by the pleasantness and harmony 
of implicated retinal or muscular tensions. Dif- 
ferent structures contain or suggest more or less of 
this kind of beauty, and in that proportion may be 
called intrinsically better or worse. Thus arti- 
ficial forms may be arranged in a hierarchy like 
natural ones, by reference to the absolute values 
of their contours and masses. Herein lies the su- 
periority of a Greek to a Chinese vase, or of Gothic 



FORM 16S 

to Saracenic construction. Thus although every 
useful form is capable of proportion and beauty, 
when once its type is established, we cannot say 
that this beauty is always potentially equal; and 
an iron bridge, for instance, although it certainly 
possesses and daily acquires aesthetic interest, will 
probably never, on the average, equal a bridge of 
8 tone. 



§41. Beauty of form is the last to Fwmw**a+ 
be found or admired in artificial as in ornamnt. 
natural objects. Time is needed to es- 
tablish it, and training and nicety of perception to 
enjoy it. Motion or colour is what first interests a 
child in toys, as in animals ; and the barbarian artist 
decorates long before he designs. The cave and wig- 
wam are daubed with paint, or hung with trophies, 
before any pleasure is taken in their shape; and the 
appeal to the detached senses, and to associations 
of wealth and luxury, precedes by far the appeal 
to the perceptive harmonies of form. In music we 
observe the same gradation; first, we appreciate its 
sensuous and sentimental value; only with educa- 
tion can we enjoy its form. The plastic arts begin, 
therefore, with adventitious ornament and with 
symbolism. The aesthetic pleasure is in the rich- 
ness of the material, the profusion of the ornament, 
the significance of the shape — in everything, rather 
than in the shape itself. 

We have accordingly in works of art two inde- 
pendent sources of effect. The first is the useful 
form, which generates the type, and ultimately the 



164 THE SENSE OF BEAUTY 

beauty of form, when the type has been idealized 
by emphasizing its intrinsically pleasing traits. 
The second is the beauty of ornament, which comes 
from the excitement of the senses, or of the imagi- 
nation, by colour, or by profusion or delicacy of 
detail. Historically, the latter is first developed, 
and applied to a form as yet merely useful. But 
the very presence of ornament attracts contempla- 
tion; the attention lavished on the object helps to 
fix its form in the mind, and to make us discrimi- 
nate the less from the more graceful. The two 
kinds of beauty are then felt, and, yielding to that 
tendency to unity which the mind always betrays, 
we begin to subordinate and organize these two 
excellences. The ornament is distributed so as 
to emphasize the SBsthetdc essence of the form; to 
idealize it even more, by adding adventitious inter- 
ests harmoniously to the intrinsic interest of the 
lines of structure. 

There is here a great field, of course, for variety 
of combination and compromise. Some artists are 
fascinated by the decoration, and think of the 
structure merely as the background on which it 
can be most advantageously displayed. Others, 
of more austere taste, allow ornament only to 
emphasize the main lines of the design, or to con- 
ceal such inharmonious elements as nature or utility 
may prevent them from eliminating. 1 We may thus 

* It ii a superstition to suppose that a refined taste would 
necessarily find the actual and useful to be the perfect ; to con- 
ceal structure is as legitimate as to emphasize it, and for the 
same reason. We emphasise in the direction of abstract beauty : 



FORM 166 

oscillate between decorative and structural motives, 
and only in one point, for each style, can we find 
the ideal equilibrium, in which the greatest strength 
and lucidity is combined with the greatest splen- 
dour. 

A less subtle, but still very effective, combina- 
tion is that hit upon by many oriental and Gfothio 
architects, and found, also, by accident perhaps, 
in many buildings of the plateresque style; the 
ornament and structure are both presented with 
extreme emphasis, but locally divided; a vast 
rough wall, for instance, represents the one, and 
a profusion of mad ornament huddled around a 
central door or window represents the other. 

Gothic architecture offers us in the pinnacle and 
flying buttress a striking example of the adoption 



In the direction of absolute pleasure ; and we conceal or elimi- 
nate in the same direction. The most exquisite Greek taste, 
for instance, preferred to drape the lower part of the female 
figure, as in the Venus of Milo ; also in men to shave the hair 
of the face and body, in order to maintain the parity and 
strength of the lines. In the one case we conceal structure, in 
the other we reveal it, modifying nature into greater sympathy 
with our faculties of perception. For, after all, it must be 
remembered that beauty, or pleasure to be given to the eye, is 
not a guiding principle in the world of nature or in that of the 
practical arts. The beauty is in nature a result of the func- 
tional adaptation of our senses and imagination to the mechan- 
ical products of our environment. This adaptation is never 
complete, and there is, accordingly; room for the fine arts, in 
which beauty is a result of the intentional adaptation of me- 
chanical forms to the functions which our senses and imagina- 
tion already have acquired. This watchful subservience to our 
sMthetio demands is the essence of fine art. Nature is the basis, 
but man is the goat 



166 THE SENSE 09 BEAUTY 

of a meohanioal feature, and its transformation into 
an element of beauty. Nothing could at first sight 
be more hopeless than the external half -arch prop- 
ping the side of a pier, or the chimney-like weight 
of stones pressing it down from above ; but a coura- 
geous acceptance of these necessities, and a submis- 
sive study of their form, revealed a new and strange, 
effect: the bewildering and stimulating intricacy of 
masses suspended in mid-air; the profusion of line, 
variety of surface, and picturesqueness of light and 
shade. It needed but a little applied ornament 
judiciously distributed; a moulding in the arches; 
a florid canopy and statue amid the buttresses; a 
few grinning monsters leaning out of unexpected 
nooks; a leafy budding of the topmost pinnacles; 
a piercing here and there of some little gallery, 
parapet, or turret into lacework against the sky — 
and the building became a poem, an inexhaustible 
emotion. Add some passing cloud casting its mov- 
ing shadow over the pile, add the circling of birds 
about the towers, and you have an unforgettable 
type of beauty; not perhaps the noblest, sanest, or 
most enduring, but one for the existence of which 
the imagination is richer, and the world more 
interesting. 

In this manner we accept the forms imposed 
upon us by utility, and train ourselves to apper- 
ceive their potential beauty. Familiarity breeds 
contempt only when it breeds inattention. When 
the mind is absorbed and dominated by its percep- 
tions, it incorporates into them more and more of 
its own functional values, and makes them ulti- 



FORM 167 

mnfcely beautiful and expressive. Thus no lan- 
guage can be ugly to those who speak it well, no 
religion unmeaning to those who have learned to 
pour their life into its moulds. 

Of course these forms vary in intrinsic excellence; 
they are by their specific character more or less fit 
and facile for the average mind. But the man and 
the age are rare who can choose their own path; we 
have generally only a choice between going ahead 
in the direction already chosen, or halting and 
blocking the path for others. The only kind of 
reform usually possible is reform from within; a 
more intimate study and more intelligent use of 
the traditional forms. Disaster follows rebellion 
against tradition or against utility, which are the 
basis and root of our taste and progress. But, 
within the given school, and as exponents of its 
spirit, we can adapt and perfect our works, if 
haply we are better inspired than our predeces- 
sors. Eor the better we know a given thing, and 
the more we perceive its strong and weak points, 
the more capable we are of idealizing it. 



§ 42. The main effect of language con- 
sists in its meaning, in the ideas which it 
expresses. But no expression is possible without 
a presentation, and this presentation must have a 
form. This form of the instrument of expression 
is itself an element of effect, although in practical 
life we may overlook it in our haste to attend to 
the meaning it conveys. It is, moreover, a condi- 
tion of the kind of expression possible, and often 



168 THE SENSE OF BEAUTY 

determines the manner in which the object tog* 
gested shall be apperoeived. No word has the 
exact value of any other in the same or in another 
language. 1 But the intrinsic effect of language 
does not stop there. The single word is but a 
stage in the series of formations which constitute 
language, and which preserve for men the fruit of 
their experience, distilled and concentrated into a 
symbol. 

This formation begins with the elementary sounds 
themselves, which have to be discriminated and 
combined to make recognizable symbols. The 
evolution of these symbols goes on spontaneously, 
suggested by our tendency to utter all manner of 
sounds, and preserved by the ease with which the 
ear discriminates these sounds when made. Speech 
would be an absolute and unrelated art, like music, 
were it not controlled by utility. The sounds have 
indeed no resemblance to the objects they symbol- 
ize; but before the system of sounds can represent 
the system of objects, there has to be a correspond- 
ence in the groupings of both. The structure of 
language, unlike that of music, thus becomes a 

1 Not only are words untranslatable when the exact object 
has no name in another language, as "home" or "mon ami/' 
but even when the object is the same, the attitude toward it, 
incorporated in one word, cannot be rendered by another. 
Thus, to my sense, " bread " is as inadequate a translation of 
the human intensity of the Spanish " pan " as " Dios " is of the 
awful mystery of the English "God." This latter word does 
not designate an object at all, but a sentiment, a psychosis, not 
to say a whole chapter of religious history. English is remark- 
able for the intensity and variety of the colour of its words. 
No language, I believe, has so many words specifically poetic 



FORM 169 

mirror of the structure of the world as presented 
to the intelligence. 

Grammar, philosophically studied, is akin to the 
deepest metaphysics, because in revealing the con- 
stitution of speech, it reveals the constitution of 
thought, and the hierarchy of those categories by 
which we conceive the world. It is by virtue of 
this parallel development that language has its 
function of expressing experience with exactness, 
and the poet — to whom language is an instrument 
of art — has to employ it also with a constant ref- 
erence to meaning and veracity; that is, he must 
be a master of experience before he can become a 
true master of words. Nevertheless, language is 
primarily a sort of music, and the beautiful effects 
which it produces are due to its own structure, 
giving, as it crystallizes in a new fashion, an 
unforeseen form to experience. 

Poets may be divided into two classes : the musi- 
cians and the psychologists. The first are masters 
of significant language as harmony; they know 
what notes to sound together and in succession; 
they can produce, by the marshalling of sounds 
and images, by the fugue of passion and the snap 
of wit, a thousand brilliant effects out of old mate- 
rials. The Ciceronian orator, the epigrammatic, 
lyric, and elegiac poets, give examples of this art. 
The psychologists, on the other hand, gain their 
effect not by the intrinsic mastery of language, 
but by the closer adaptation of it to things. The 
dramatic poets naturally furnish an illustration. 

But however transparent we may wish to make 



170 THE SENSE OF BEAUTY 

oar language, however little we may call for its 
intrinsic effects, and direct our attention exclu- 
sively to its expressiveness, we cannot avoid the 
limitations of our particular medium. The char- 
acter of the tongue a man speaks, and the degree 
of his skill in speaking it, must always count 
enormously in the aesthetic value of his composi- 
tions; no skill in observation, no depth of thought 
or feeling, but is spoiled by a bad style and en- 
hanced by a good one. The diversities of tongues 
and their irreducible aesthetic values, begins with 
the very sound of the letters, with the mode of 
utterance, and the characteristic inflections of 
the voice; notice, for instance, the effect of the 
French of these lines of Alfred de Musset, 

Jamais deux yeux plus doux n'ont da clel le plus pur 
Sondl la profondeur et r6fl&hi l'azor. 

and compare with its flute-like and treble quality 
the breadth, depth, and volume of the German in 
this inimitable stanza of Goethe's : 

Ueber alien Gipf em 

Lit Rah, 

In alien Wipfeln 

Sparest da 

Eaam einen Hauch ; 

Die VOgelein schweigen im Walde. 

Warte nor, balde 

Ruhest du auch. 

Even if the same tune could be played on both 
these vocal instruments, the difference in their 
timbre would make the value of the melody entirely 
distinct in each case. 



FORM 171 

i 43. The known impossibility of 9ymtmthmt 
adequate translation appears here at 
the basis of language. The other diversities are 
superadded upon this diversity of sound. The 
syntax is the next source of effect. What could 
be better than Homer, or what worse than almost 
any translation of him? And this holds even of 
languages so closely allied as the Indo-European, 
which, after all, have certain correspondences of 
syntax and inflection. If there could be a lan- 
guage with other parts of speech than ours, — a 
language without nouns, for instance, — how would 
that grasp of experience, that picture of the world, 
which all our literature contains, be reproduced in 
it? Whatever beauties that language might be 
susceptible of, none of the effects produced on us, 
I will not say by poets, but even by nature itself, 
could be expressed in it 

Nor is such a language inconceivable. Instead 
of summarizing all our experiences of a thing by 
one word, its name, we should have to recall by 
appropriate adjectives the various sensations we 
had received from it; the objects we think of would 
be disintegrated, or, rather, would never have been 
unified. For " sun," they would say "high, yellow, 
dazzling, round, slowly moving, " and the enumer- 
ation of these qualities (as we call them), without 
any suggestion of a unity at their source, might 
give a more vivid and profound, if more cumbrous, 
representation of the facts. But how could the 
machinery of such an imagination be capable of 
repeating the effects of ours, when the objects to 



172 THE flENBE OF BEAUTY 

us most obvioui and real would be to those minds 
utterly indescribable? 

The same diversity appears in the languages 
we ordinarily know, only in a lesser degree. The 
presence or absence of case-endings in nouns and 
adjectives, their difference of gender, the richness 
of inflections in the verbs, the frequency of par- 
ticles and conjunctions, — all these characteristics 
make one language differ from another entirely in 
genius and capacity of expression. Greek is prob- 
ably the best of all languages in melody, rich- 
ness, elasticity, and simplicity; so much so, that 
in spite of its complex inflections, when once a 
vocabulary is acquired, it is more easy and nat- 
ural for a modern than his ancestral Latin itself. 
Latin is the stiffer tongue; it is by nature at 
once laconic and grandiloquent, and the excep- 
tional condensation and transposition of which it 
is capable make its effects entirely foreign to a 
modern, scarcely inflected, tongue. Take, for in- 
stance, these lines of Horace: 

me tabula aacer 
votiva paries indicat uvida 
auspendiaie potenti 
Yeatimenta maris dso, 

or these of Lucretius : 

Jamque caput quaasana grandia auapirat arator 
Crebriua incaasum magnum oaoidiaae laboram. 

What conglomerate plebeian speech of our time 
could utter the stately grandeur of these Lucretian 
words, every one of which is noble, an4 wears the 
toga? 



FORM 173 

As a substitute for the inimitable interpenetra- 
tion of the words in the Horatian strophe, we might 
hare the external links of rhyme; and it seems, in 
fact, to be a justification of rhyme, that besides 
contributing something to melody and to the dis- 
tribution of parts, it gives an artificial relationship 
to the phrases between which it obtains, which, but 
for it, would run away from one another in a rapid 
and irrevocable flux. In such a form as the sonnet, 
for instance, we have, by dint of assonance, a real 
unity forced upon the thought; for a sonnet in 
which the thought is not distributed appropriately 
to the structure of the verse, has no excuse for 
being a sonnet. By virtue of this inter-relation 
of parts, the sonnet, the non plus ultra of rhyme, 
is the most classic of modern poetical forms : much 
more classic in spirit than blank verse, which lacks 
almost entirely the power of synthesizing the 
phrase, and making the unexpected seem the in- 
evitable. 

This beauty given to the ancients by the syntax 
of their language, the moderns can only attain 
by the combination of their rhymes. It is a 
bad substitute perhaps, but better than the total 
absence of form, favoured by the atomic character 
of our words, and the flat juxtaposition of our 
clauses. The art which was capable of making a 
gem of every prose sentence, — the art which, car- 
ried, perhaps, to a pitch at which it became too 
conscious, made the phrases of Tacitus a series of 
cameos, — that art is inapplicable to our looser 
medium; we cannot g\ve clay the finish and nicety 



1T4 THE SENSE OF BEAUTY 

of marble. Our poetry and speech in general, 
therefore, start out upon a lower level; the same 
effort will not, with this instrument, attain the 
same beauty. If equal beauty is ever attained, it 
comes from the wealth of suggestion, or the refine- 
ment of sentiment. The art of words remains 
hopelessly inferior. And what best proves this, 
is that when, as in our time, a reawakening of the 
love of beauty has prompted a refinement of our 
poetical language, we pass so soon into extrava- 
gance, obscurity, and affectation. Our modern 
languages are not susceptible of great formal 
beauty. 

utmmryform. §44. The forms of composition in 
n§p * t verse and prose which are practised in 
each language are further organizations of words, 
and have formal values. The most exacting of 
these forms and that which has been carried to the 
greatest perfection is the drama; but it belongs to 
rhetoric and poetics to investigate the nature of 
these effects, and we have here sufficiently indi- 
cated the principle which underlies them. The plot, 
which Aristotle makes, and very justly, the most 
important element in the effect of a drama, is the 
formal element of the drama as such: the ethos 
and sentiments are the expression, and the versifi- 
cation, music, and stage settings are the materials. 
It is in harmony with the romantic tendency of 
modern times that modern dramatists — Shake- 
speare as well as Moliere, Calderon, and the rest — 
exeel in ethos rather than in plot; for it is the 



1T5 

evident characteristic of modern genius to study 
and enjoy expression, — the suggestion of the not- 
given, — rather than form, the harmony of the 
given. 

Ethos is interesting mainly for the personal 
observations -which it summarizes and reveals, or 
for the appeal to one's own actual or imaginative 
experience; it is portrait-painting, and enshrines 
something we love independently of the charm 
which at this moment and in this place it exercises 
over us. It appeals to our affections; it does not 
form them. But the plot is the synthesis of 
actions, and is a reproduction of those experiences 
from which our notion of men and things is origi- 
nally derived; for character can never be observed 
in the world except as manifested in action. 

Indeed, it would be more fundamentally accurate 
to say that a character is a symbol and mental ab- 
breviation for a peculiar set of acts, than to say 
that acts are a manifestation of character. For 
the acts are the data, and the character the inferred 
principle, and a principle, in spite of its name, is 
never more than a description a posteriori, and a 
summary of what is subsumed under it. The plot, 
moreover, is what gives individuality to the play, 
and exercises invention*, it is, as Aristotle again 
says, the most difficult portion of dramatic art, 
and that for which practice and training are most 
indispensable. And this plot, giving by its nature 
a certain picture of human experience, involves 
and suggests the ethos of its actors. 

What the great characterixers, like Shakespeare, 



176 THE SENSE OF BEAUTY 

do, is simply to elaborate and develope (perhaps far 
beyond the necessities of the plot) the suggestion 
of human individuality which that plot contains. 
It is as if, having drawn from daily observation 
some knowledge of the tempers of our friends, we 
represented them saying and doing all manner of 
ultra-characteristic things, and in an occasional 
soliloquy laying bare, even more clearly than by 
any possible action, that character which their 
observed behaviour had led us to impute to them. 
This is an ingenious and fascinating invention, 
and delights us with the clear discovery of a hid- 
den personality; but the serious and equable devel- 
opment of a plot has a more stable worth in its 
greater similarity to life, which allows us to see 
other men's minds through the medium of events, 
and not events through the medium of other men's 
minds. 

Otoraetf a» | 45. ^ e have just come upon one of 

Off (MtAftfo 

/brm. the unities most coveted in our litera- 

ture, and most valued by us when 
attained, — the portrait, the individuality, the char- 
acter. The construction of a plot we call inven- 
tion, but that of b, character we dignify with the 
name of creation. It may therefore not be amiss, 
in finishing our discussion of form, to devote a 
few pages to the psychology of character-drawing. 
How does the unity we call a character arise, how 
is it described, and what is the basis of its effect? 
We may set it down at once as evident that we 
have here a case of the type: the similarities of 



FORM 177 

various persons ore amalgamated, their differences 
cancelled, and in the resulting percept those traits 
emphasized which have particularly pleased or in- 
terested us. Thi8£ in the abstract, may serve for 
a description of the origin of an idea of character 
quite as well as of an idea of physical form. But 
the different nature of the material — the fact that a 
character is not a presentation to sense, but a ration- 
alistic synthesis of successive acts and feelings, not 
combinable into any image — makes such a descrip- 
tion much more unsatisfying in this case than in 
that of material forms. We cannot understand 
exactly how these summations and cancellings take 
place when we are not dealing with a visible object. 
And we may even feel that there is a wholeness 
and inwardness about the development of certain 
ideal characters, that makes such a treatment of 
them fundamentally false and artificial. The sub- 
jective element, the spontaneous expression of our 
own passion and will, here counts for so much, 
that the creation of an ideal character becomes a 
new and peculiar problem. 

There is, however, a way of conceiving and 
delineating character which still bears a close 
resemblance to the process by which the imagina- 
tion produces the type of any physical species. We 
may gather, for instance, about the nucleus of a 
word, designating some human condition or occu- 
pation, a number of detached observations. We 
may keep a note-book in our memory, or even in 
our pocket, with studious observations of the lan- 
guage, manners, dress, gesture, and history of the 



178 THE SENSE OF BEAUTY 

people we meet, classifying our statistics under 
such heads as innkeepers, soldiers, housemaids, 
governesses, adventuresses, Germans, Frenchmen, 
Italians, Americans, actors, priests, and professors. 
And then, when occasion offers, to describe, or to 
pat into a book or a play, any one of these types, 
all we have to do is to look over our notes, to select 
according to the needs of the moment, and if we 
are skilful in reproduction, to obtain by that 
means a life-like image of the sort of person we 
wish to represent. 

This process, which novelists and playwrights 
may go through deliberately, we all carry on in- 
voluntarily. At every moment experience is leav- 
ing in our minds some trait, some expression, some 
image, which will remain there attached to the 
name of a person, a class, or a nationality. Our 
likes and dislikes, our summary judgments on whole 
categories of men, are nothing but the distinct sur- 
vival of some such impression. These traits have 
vivacity. If the picture they draw is one-sided 
and inadequate, the sensation they recall may be 
vivid, and suggestive of many other aspects of the 
thing. Thus the epithets in Homer, although they 
are often far from describing the essence of the 
object — y\avKu>7ris *A(hqvt) 9 evKvy/Jufos *A^otoc — seem 
to recall a sensation, and to give vitality to the 
narrative. By bringing you, through one sense, 
into the presenoe of the object, they give you that 
same hint of further discovery, that same expec- 
tation of experience, which we have at the sight 
of whatever we call real. 



179 

The graphic power of this method of observation 
and aggregation of characteristic traits is thus seen 
to be great. But it is not by this method that the 
most famous or most living characters have been 
conceived. This method gives the average, or at 
most the salient, points of the type, but the great 
characters of poetry — a Hamlet, a Don Quixote, 
an Achilles — are no averages, they are not even a 
collection of salient traits common to certain classes 
of men. They seem to be persons; that is, their 
actions and words seem to spring from the inward 
nature of an individual soul. Goethe is reported 
to have said that he conceived the character of his 
Gretchen entirely without observation of originals. 
And, indeed, he would probably not have found 
any. His creation rather is the original to which 
we may occasionally think we see some likeness in 
real maidens. It is the fiction here that is the 
standard of naturalness. And on this, as on so 
many occasions, we may repeat the saying that 
poetry is truer than history. Perhaps no actual 
maid ever spoke and acted so naturally as this 
imaginary one. 

If we think there is any paradox in these asser- 
tions, we should reflect that the standard of natu- 
ralness, individuality, and truth is in us. A real 
person seems to us to have character and consist- 
ency when his behaviour is such as to impress a 
definite and simple image upon our mind. In 
themselves, if we could count all their undiscovered 
springs of action, all men have character and con- 
sistency alike: all are equally fit to be types. But 



180 THE SENSE OF BEAUTY 

their characters are not equally intelligible to us, 
their behaviour is not equally deducible, and their 
motives not equally appreciable. Those who ap- 
peal most to us, either in themselves or by the 
emphasis they borrow from their similarity to other 
individuals, are those we remember and regard as 
the centres around which variations oscillate. 
These men are natural: all others are more or 
less eccentric. 

idwi § 46. The standard of naturalness 

being thus subjective, and determined 
by the laws of our imagination, we can understand 
why a spontaneous creation of the mind can be 
more striking and living than any reality, or any 
abstraction from realities. The artist can invent 
a form which, by its adaptation to the imagination, 
lodges there, and becomes a point of reference for 
all observations, and a standard of naturalness and 
beauty. A type may be introduced to the mind 
suddenly, by the chance presentation of a form 
that by its intrinsic impressiveness and imagina- 
tive coherence, acquires that pre-eminence which 
custom, or the mutual reinforcement of converging 
experiences, ordinarily gives to empirical percepts. 
This method of originating types is what we 
ordinarily describe as artistic creation. The name 
indicates the suddenness, originality, and individu- 
ality of the conception thus attained. What we 
call idealization is often a case of it. In idealiza- 
tion proper, however, what happens is the elimina- 
tion of individual eccentricities; the result is 



FORM 181 

abstract^ and consequently meagre. This meagre- 
ness is often felt to be a greater disadvantage than 
the accidental and picturesque imperfection of real 
individuals, and the artist therefore turns to the 
brute fact, and studies and reproduces that with in- 
discriminate attention, rather than lose strength and 
individuality in the presentation of an insipid type. 
He seems forced to a choice between an abstraot 
beauty and an unlovely example. 

But the great and masterful presentations of the 
ideal are somehow neither the one nor the other. 
They present ideal beauty with just that definite- 
ness with which nature herself sometimes presents 
it. When we come in a crowd upon an incom- 
parably beautiful face, we know it immediately as 
an embodiment of the ideal; while it contains the 
type, — for if it did not we should find it mon- 
strous and grotesque, — it clothes that type in a 
peculiar splendour of form, colour, and expression. 
It has an individuality. And just so the imaginary 
figures of poetry and plastic art may have an in- 
dividuality given them by the happy affinities of 
their elements in the imagination. They are not 
idealizations, they are spontaneous variations, 
which can arise in the mind quite as easily as in 
the world. They spring up in 

The wreathed trellis of a working brain ; 

. . . With all the gardener fancy e'er could feign 

Who, breeding flowers, will never breed the same. 

Imagination, in a word, generates as well as 
abstracts; it observes, combines, and cancels; but 



182 THE 8EN8B OF BEAUTY 

it also dreams. Spontaneous syntheses arise in it 
which are not mathematical averages of the images 
it receives from sense; they are effects of diffused 
excitements left in the brain by sensations. These 
excitements vary constantly in their various re* 
newals, and occasionally take such a form that 
the soul is surprised by the inward vision of an 
unexampled beauty. If this inward vision is 
clear and steady, we have an aesthetic inspiration, 
a vocation to create; and if we can also command 
the technique of an appropriate art, we shall 
hasten to embody that inspiration, and realize an 
ideal. This ideal will be gradually recognized as 
supremely beautiful for the same reason that the 
object, had it been presented in the real world, 
would have been recognized as supremely beauti- 
ful; because while embodying a known type of 
form, — being, that is, a proper man, animal, or 
vegetable, — it possessed in an extraordinary de- 
gree those direct charms which most subjugate 
our attention. 

Imaginary forms then differ in dignity and 
beauty not according to their closeness to fact or 
type in nature, but according to the ease with 
which the normal imagination reproduces the syn- 
thesis they contain. To add wings to a man has 
always been a natural fancy; because man can 
easily imagine himself to fly, and the idea is 
delightful to him. The winged man is therefore 
a form generally recognized as beautiful; although 
it can happen, as it did to Michael Angelo, that 
our appreciation of the actual form of the human 



FORM 183 

body should be too keen and overmastering to 
allow us to relish even so charming and imagi- 
native an extravagance. The centaur is another 
beautiful monster. The imagination can easily 
follow the synthesis of the dream in which horse 
and man melted into one, and first gave the glorious 
suggestion of their united vitality. 

The same condition determines the worth of 
imaginary personalities. From the gods to the 
characters of comedy, all are, in proportion to 
their beauty, natural and exhilarating expressions 
of possible human activity. We sometimes re- 
mould visible forms into imaginary creatures; but 
our originality in this respect is meagre compared 
with the profusion of images of action which arise 
in US) both asleep and awake; we constantly dream 
of new situations, extravagant adventures, and ex- 
aggerated passions. Even our soberer thoughts 
are very much given to following the possible 
fortunes of some enterprise, and foretasting the 
satisfactions of love and ambition. The mind 
is therefore particularly sensitive to pictures of 
action and character; we are easily induced to 
follow the fortunes of any hero, and share his 
sentiments. 

Our will, as Descartes said in a different con- 
text, is infinite, while our intelligence is finite; 
we follow experience pretty closely in our ideas 
of things, and even the furniture of fairyland 
bears a sad resemblance to that of earth; but there 
is no limit to the elasticity of our passion; and we 
love to fancy ourselves kings and beggars, saints 



184 THE SENSE OF BEAUTY 

and villains, young and old, happy and unhappy* 
There seems to be a boundless capacity of develop- 
ment in each of us, which the circumstances of life 
determine to a narrow channel; and we like to re- 
venge ourselves in our reveries for this imputed 
limitation, by classifying ourselves with all that 
we are not, but might so easily have been. We 
are full of sympathy for every manifestation of 
life, however unusual; and even the conception of 
infinite knowledge and happiness — than which 
nothing could be more removed from our condi- 
tion or more unrealizable to our fancy — remains 
eternally interesting to us. 

The poet, therefore, who wishes to delineate a 
character need not keep a note-book. There is a 
quicker road to the heart — if he has the gift to 
find it. Probably his readers will not themselves 
have kept note-books, and his elaborate observa- 
tions will only be effective when he describes 
something which they also happen to hare noticed. 
The typical characters describable by the empirical 
method are therefore few: the miser, the lover, 
the old nurse, the ingenue, and the other types 
of traditional comedy. Any greater specification 
would appeal only to a small audience for a short 
time, because the characteristics depicted would 
no longer exist to be recognized. But whatever 
experience a poet's hearers may have had, they 
are men. They will have certain imaginative 
capacities to conceive and admire those forms of 
character and action which, although never acta* 
ally found, are felt by each man to express what 



FORM 186 

he himself might and would have been, had cir- 
cumstances been more favourable. 

The poet has only to study himself, and the art 
of expressing his own ideals, to find that he has 
expressed those of other people. He has but to 
enact in himself the part of eaeh of his person- 
ages, and if he possesses that pliability and that 
definiteness of imagination which together make 
genius, he may express for his fellows those in- 
ward tendencies which in them have remained 
painfully dumb. He will be hailed as master of 
the human soul. He may know nothing of men, 
he may have almost no experience; but his crea- 
tions will pass for models of naturalness, and for 
types of humanity. Their names will be in every 
one's mouth, and the lives of many generations 
will be enriched by the vision, one might almost 
say by the friendship, of these imaginary beings. 
They have individuality without having reality, 
because individuality is a thing acquired in the 
mind by the congeries of its impressions. They 
have power, also, because that depends on the 
appropriateness of a stimulus to touch the springs 
of reaction in the soul. And they of course have 
beauty, because in them is embodied the greatest 
of our imaginative delights, — that of giving body 
to our latent capacities, and of wandering, without 
the strain and contradiction of actual existence, 
into all forms of possible being. 

{ 47. The greatest of these creations »•«*««• 
have not been the work of any one man. 



186 THE SENS! OF BEAUTY 

They hare been the slow product of the pious and 
poetic imagination. Starting from some personifi- 
cation of nature or some memory of a great man, 
the popular and priestly tradition has refined and 
developed the ideal; it has made it an expression 
of men's aspiration and a counterpart of their need. 
The devotion of each tribe, shrine, and psalmist has 
added some attribute to the god or some parable to 
his legend; and thus, around the kernel of some 
original divine function, the imagination of a 
people has gathered every possible expression of 
it, creating a complete and beautiful personality, 
with its history, its character, and its gifts. No 
poet has ever equalled the perfection or signifi- 
cance of these religious creations. The greatest 
characters of fiction are uninteresting and unreal 
compared with the conceptions of the gods; so 
much so that men have believed that their gods 
have objective reality. 

The forms men see in dreams might have been 
a reason for believing in vague and disquieting 
ghosts; but the belief in individual and well- 
defined divinities, with which the visions of the 
dreams might be identified, is obviously due to the 
intrinsic coherence and impressiveness of the con- 
ception of those deities. The visions would never 
have suggested the legend and attributes of the 
god; but when the figure of the god was once 
imaginatively conceived, and his name and aspect 
fixed in the imagination, it would be easy to recog- 
nize him in any hallucination, or to interpret any 
event as due to his power. These manifestations, 



FORM 187 

which constitute the evidence of his actual exist- 
ence, can be regarded as manifestations of him, 
rather than of a vague, unknown power, only when 
the imagination already possesses a vivid picture 
of him, and of his appropriate functions. This 
picture is the work of a spontaneous fancy. 

No doubt, when the belief is once specified, and 
the special and intelligible god is distinguished in 
the night and horror of the all-pervading natural 
power, the belief in his reality helps to concentrate 
our attention on his nature, and thus to develope 
and enrich our idea. The belief in the reality of 
an ideal personality brings about its further ideal- 
ization. Had it ever occurred to any Greek seer 
to attribute events to the influence of Achilles, or 
to offer sacrifices to him in the heat of the enthusi- 
asm kindled by the thought of his beauty and 
virtue, the legend of Achilles, now become a god, 
would have grown and deepened; it would have 
been moralized like the legend of Hercules, or 
naturalized like that of Persephone, and what is 
now but a poetic character of extraordinary force 
and sublimity would have become the adored 
patron of generation after generation, and a mani- 
festation of the divine man. 

Achilles would then have been as significant and 
unforgettable a figure as Apollo or his sister, as 
Zeus, Athena, and the other greater gods. If 
ever, while that phase of religion lasted, his 
character had been obscured and his featCles 
dimmed, he would have been recreated by every 
new votary; poets would never have tired of sing- 



188 1HJC SENSE OF BEAUTY 



ing his praises, or sculptors of rendering his form. 
When, after the hero had been the centre and sub- 
ject of so much imaginative labour, the belief in 
his reality lapsed, to be transferred to some other 
conception of cosmic power, he would have re- 
mained an ideal of poetry and art, and a formative 
influence of all cultivated minds. This he is still, 
like all the great creations of avowed fiction, but 
he would have been immensely more so, had belief 
in his reality kept the creative imagination con- 
tinuously intent upon his nature. 

The reader can hardly fail to see that all this 
applies with equal force to the Christian concep- 
tion of the sacred personalities. Christ, the Virgin 
Mary, and the saints may have been exactly what 
our imagination pictures them to be; that is en- 
tirely possible; nor can I see that it is impossible 
that the conceptions of other religions might them- 
selves have actual counterparts somewhere in the 
universe. That is a question of faith and empirical 
evidence with which we are not here concerned. 
But however descriptive of truth our conceptions 
may be, they have evidently grown up in our minds 
by an inward process of development. The mate- 
rials of history and tradition have been melted and 
recast by the devout imagination into those figures 
in the presence of which our piety lives. 

That is the reason why the reconstructed logical 
gods of the metaphysicians are always an offence 
and a mockery to the religious consciousness. 
There is here, too, a bare possibility that some one 
of these absolutes may be a representation of the 



FORM 189 

truth; but the method by which this representation 
is acquired is violent and artificial; while the tra- 
ditional conception of God is the spontaneous em- 
bodiment of passionate contemplation and long 
experience. 

As the God of religion differs from that of meta- 
physics, so does the Christ of tradition differ from 
that of our critical historians. Even if we took 
the literal narrative of the Gospels and accepted it 
as all we could know of Christ, without allowing 
ourselves any imaginative interpretation of the 
oentral figure, we should get an ideal of him, I 
will not say very different from that of St. Francis 
or St. Theresa, but even from that of the English 
prayer-book. The Christ men have loved and 
adored is an ideal of their own hearts, the con- 
struction of an ever-present personality, living 
and intimately understood, out of the fragments of 
story and doctrine connected with a name. This 
subjective image has inspired all the prayers, all 
the conversions, all the penances, charities, and 
sacrifices, as well as half the art of the Christian 
world. 

The Virgin Mary, whose legend is so meagre, 
but whose power over the Catholic imagination is 
so great, is an even clearer illustration of this 
inward building up of an ideal form. Everything 
is here spontaneous sympathetic expansion of two 
given events: the incarnation and the crucifixion. 
The figure of the Virgin, found in these mighty 
scenes, is gradually clarified and developed, until 
w come to the thought on the one hand of her 



190 THE SENSE OF BEAUTY 

freedom from original sin, and on the other to that 
of her universal maternity. We thus attain the 
conception of one of the noblest of conceivable 
rOles and of one of the most beautiful of charac- 
ters. It is a pity that a foolish iconoclasm should 
so long have deprived the Protestant mind of the 
contemplation of this ideal. 

Perhaps it is a sign of the average imaginative 
dulness or fatigue of certain races and epochs that 
they so readily abandon these supreme creations. 
For, if we are hopeful, why should we not believe 
that the best we can fancy is also the truest; and 
if we are distrustful in general of our prophetic 
gifts, why should we cling only to the most mean 
and formless of our illusions? From the begin- 
ning to the end of our perceptive and imaginative 
activity, we are synthesizing the material of expe- 
rience into unities the independent reality of which 
is beyond proof, nay, beyond the possibility of a 
shadow of evidence. And yet the life of intelli- 
gence, like the joy of contemplation, lies entirely 
in the formation and inter-relation of these unities. 
This activity yields us all the objects with which 
we can deal, and endows them with the finer and 
more intimate part of their beauty. The most 
perfect of these forms, judged by its affinity to our 
powers and its stability in the presence of our experi- 
ence, is the one with which we should be content; 
no other kind of veracity could add to its value. 

The greatest feats of synthesis which the human 
mind has yet accomplished will, indeed, be probably 
surpassed and all ideals yet formed be superseded, 



FORM 191 

because they were not based upon enough experi- 
ence, or did not fit that experience with, adequate 
precision. It is also possible that changes in the 
character of the facts, or in the powers of intelli- 
gence, should necessitate a continual reconstruc- 
tion of our world. But unless human nature 
suffers an inconceivable change, the chief intel- 
lectual and aesthetic value of our ideas will always 
come from the creative action of the imagination. 



PART IV 

EXPRESSION 

{ 48. We have found in the beauty 
of material and form the objectification 
of oertain pleasures connected with the process of 
direct perception, with the formation, in the one 
case of a sensation, or quality, in the other of a syn- 
thesis of sensations or qualities. But the human 
consciousness is not a perfectly clear mirror, with 
distinct boundaries and clear-cut images, determi- 
nate in number and exhaustively perceived. Our 
ideas half emerge for a moment from the dim 
continuum of vital feeling and diffused sense, and 
are hardly fixed before they are changed and 
transformed, by the shifting of attention and the 
perception of new relations, into ideas of really 
different objects. This fluidity of the mind would 
make reflection impossible, did we not fix in words 
and other symbols certain abstract contents; we 
thus become capable of recognizing in one percep- 
tion the repetition of another, and of recognizing 
in certain recurrences of impressions a persistent 
object. This discrimination and classification of 
the contents of consciousness is the work of per- 
ception and understanding, and the pleasures that 
1« . 



EXPRESSION 193 

accompany these activities make the beauty of the 
sensible world. 

But our hold upon our thoughts extends even 
further. We not only construct visible unities 
and recognizable types, but remain aware of their 
affinities to what is not at the time perceived; that 
is, we find in them a certain tendency and quality, 
not original to them, a meaning and a tone, which 
upon investigation we shall see to have been the 
proper characteristics of other objects and feelings, 
associated with them once in our experience. The 
hushed reverberations of these associated feelings 
continue in the brain, and by modifying our pres- 
ent reaction, colour the image upon which our 
attention is fixed. The quality thus acquired by 
objects through association is ^hat we call their 
expression. Whereas in form or material there is 
one object with its emotional effect, in expression 
there are two, and the emotional effect belongs to 
the character of the second or suggested one. Ex- 
pression may thus make beautiful by suggestion 
things in themselves indifferent, or it may come to 
heighten the beauty which they already possess. 

Expression is not always distinguishable in con- 
sciousness from the value of material or form, be- 
cause we do not always have a distinguishable 
memory of the related idea which the expressive- 
ness implies. When we have such a memory, as 
at the sight of some once frequented garden, we 
clearly and spontaneously attribute our emotion to 
the memory and not to the present fact which it 
beautifies. The revival of a pleasure and its em- 



194 THE SEW SB OF BEAUTY 

bodiment in a present object which in itself might 
have been indifferent, is here patent and acknowl- 
edged. 

The distinctness of the analysis may indeed be 
so great as to prevent the synthesis; we may so 
entirely pass to the suggested object, that our pleas- 
ure will be embodied in the memory of that, while 
the suggestive sensation will be overlooked, and 
the expressiveness of the present object will fail to 
make it beautiful. Thus the mementos of a lost 
friend do not become beautiful by virtue of the 
sentimental associations which may make them 
precious. The value is confined to the images of 
the memory; they are too clear to let any of that 
value escape and diffuse itself over the rest of our 
consciousness, and beautify the objects which we 
actually behold. We say explicitly: lvalue this 
trifle for its associations. And so long as this 
division continues, the worth of the thing is not 
for us aesthetic. 

But a little dimming of our memory will often 
make it so. Let the images of the past fade, 
let them remain simply as a halo and suggestion 
of happiness hanging about a scene; then this 
scene, however empty and uninteresting in itself, 
will have a deep and intimate charm; we shall be 
pleased by its very vulgarity. We shall not con- 
fess so readily that we value the place for its asso- 
ciations; we shall rather say: I am fond of this 
landscape; it has for me an ineffable attraction. 
The treasures of the memory have been melted and 
dissolved, and are now gilding the object that sup- 



EXPRESSION 195 

plants them; they are giving this object expres- 
sion. 

Expression then differs from material or formal 
value only as habit differs from instinct — in its 
origin. Physiologically, they are both pleasurable 
radiations of a given stimulus; mentally, they are 
both values incorporated in an object. But an 
observer, looking at the mind historically, sees in 
the one case the survival of an experience, in the 
other the reaction of an innate disposition. This 
experience, moreover, is generally rememberable, 
and then the extrinsic source of the charm which 
expression gives becomes evident even to the con- 
sciousness in which it arises. A word, for instance, 
is often beautiful simply by virtue of its meaning 
and associations; but sometimes this expressive 
beauty is added to a musical quality in the world 
itself. In all expression we may thus distinguish 
two terms : the first is the object actually presented, 
the word, the image, the expressive thing; the 
second is the object suggested, the further thought, 
emotion, or image evoked, the thing expressed. 

These lie together in the mind, and their union 
constitutes expression. If the value lies wholly in 
the first term, we have no beauty of expression. 
The decorative inscriptions in Saracenic monu- 
ments can have no beauty of expression for one 
who does not read Arabic; their charm is wholly 
one of material and form. Or if they have any 
expression, it is by virtue of such thoughts as they 
might suggest, as, for instance, of the piety and 
oriental sententiousness of the builders and of the 



196 THE 8EN8E OF BEAUTY 

aloofness from us of all their world. And even 
these suggestions, being a wandering of our fancy 
rather than a study of the object, would fail to 
arouse a pleasure which would be incorporated in 
the present image. The scroll would remain with- 
out expression, although its presence might have 
suggested to us interesting visions of other things. 
The two terms would be too independent, and the 
intrinsic values of each would remain distinct from 
that of the other. There would be no visible 
expressiveness, although there might have been 
discursive suggestions. 

Indeed, if expression were constituted by the 
external relation of object with object, everything 
would be expressive equally, indeterminately, and 
universally. The flower in the crannied wall would 
express the same thing as the bust of Caesar or the 
Critique of Pure Season. What constitutes the in- 
dividual expressiveness of these things is the circle 
of thoughts allied to each in a given mind; my 
words, for instance, express the thoughts which 
they actually arouse in the reader; they may 
express more to one man than to another, and to 
me they may have expressed more or less than to 
you. My thoughts remain unexpressed, if my 
words do not arouse them in you, and very likely 
your greater wisdom will find in what I say the 
manifestation of a thousand principles of which I 
never dreamed. Expression depends upon the 
union of two terms, one of which must be fur- 
nished by the imagination; and a mind cannot 
furnish what it does not possess. The expressive- 



EXPRESSION 197 

ness of everything accordingly increases with the 
intelligence of the observer. 

But for expression to be an element of beauty, it 
must, of course, fulfil another condition. I may 
see the relations of an object, I may understand it 
perfectly, and may nevertheless regard it with en- 
tire indifference. If the pleasure fails, the very 
substance and protoplasm of beauty is wanting. 
Nor, as we have seen, is even the pleasure enough; 
for I may receive a letter full of the most joyous 
news, but neither the paper, nor the writing, nor 
the style, need seem beautiful to me. Not until I 
confound the impressions, and suffuse the symbols 
themselves with the emotions they arouse, and find 
joy and sweetness in the very words I hear, will 
the expressiveness constitute a beauty; as when 
they sing, Gloria in excelsis Deo. 

The value of the second term must be incor- 
porated in the first; for the beauty of expression 
is as inherent in the object as that of material 
or form, only it accrues to that object not from 
the bare act of perception, but from the associa- 
tion with it of further processes, due to the exist- 
ence of former impressions. We may conveniently 
use the word "expressiveness" to mean all the 
capacity of suggestion possessed by a thing, and 
the word " expression " for the aesthetic modifi- 
cation which that expressiveness may cause in it. 
Expressiveness is thus the power given by expe- 
rience to any image to call up others in the mind; 
and this expressiveness becomes an aesthetic value, 
that is, becomes expression, when the value in- 



198 THE SENSE OF BEAUTY 

volved in the associations thus awakened aw inoor* 
porated in the present object. 



§48. The purest case in which an 
expressive value could arise might seem 
to be that in which both terms were indifferent in 
themselves, and what pleased was the activity of 
relating them. We have such a phenomenon in 
mathematics, and in any riddle, puzzle, or play 
with symbols. But such pleasures fall without 
the aesthetic field in the absence of any objectifica- 
tion; they are pleasures of exercise, and the objects 
involved are not regarded as the substances in which 
those values inhere. We think of more or less in- 
teresting problems or calculations, but it never 
occurs to the mathematician to establish a hier- 
archy of forms according to their beauty. Only by 
a metaphor could he say that (a + b) % =s a* + 2ab + V 
was a more beautiful formula than 2 + 2 = 4. Yet 
in proportion as such conceptions become definite 
and objective in the mind, they approach aesthetic 
values, and the use of aesthetic epithets in describ- 
ing them becomes more constant and literal. 

The beauties of abstract music are but one step 
beyond such mathematical relations — they are 
those relations presented in a sensible form, and 
constituting an imaginable object. But, as we see 
clearly in this last case, when the relation and not 
the terms constitute the object, we have, if there 
is beauty at all, a beauty of form, not of expres- 
sion ; for the more mathematical the charm of 
music is, the more form and the less expression 



EXPRESSION 199 

do we see in it. In fact, the sense of relation is 
here the essence of the object itself, and the 
activity of passing from term to term, far from 
taking us beyond our presentation to something 
extrinsic, constitutes that presentation. The 
pleasure of this relational activity is therefore 
the pleasure of conceiving a determined form! and 
nothing could be more thoroughly a formal beauty. 

And we may here insist upon a point of funda- 
mental importance; namely, that the process of 
association enters consciousness as directly, and 
produces as simple a sensation, as any process in 
any organ. The pleasures and pains of cerebra- 
tion, the delight and the fatigue of it, are felt 
exactly like bodily impressions; they have the 
same directness, although not the same localiza- 
tion. Their seat is not open to our daily observa- 
tion, and therefore we leave them disembodied, and 
fancy they are peculiarly spiritual and intimate to 
the soul. Or we try to think that they flow by 
some logical necessity from the essences of objects 
simultaneously in our mind. We involve our- 
selves in endless perplexities in trying to deduce 
excellence and beauty, unity and necessity, from 
the describable qualities of things; we repeat the 
rationalistic fiction of turning the notions which 
we abstract from the observation of facts into the 
powers that give those facts character and being. 

We have, for instance, in the presence of two im- 
ages a sense of their incongruity; and we say that 
the character of the images causes this emotion; 
whereas in dreams we constantly have the most 



200 THE SENSE OF BEAUTY 

rapid transformations and patent contradictions 
without any sense of incongruity at all; because 
the brain is dozing and the necessary shock and 
mental inhibition is avoided. Add this stimula- 
tion, and the incongruity returns. Had such a 
shock never been felt, we should not know what 
incongruity meant; no more than without eyes we 
should know the meaning of blue or yellow. 

In saying this, we are not really leaning upon 
physiological theory. The appeal to our knowledge 
of the brain facilitates the conception of the imme- 
diacy of our feelings of relation ; but that immediacy 
would be apparent to a sharp introspection. We 
do not need to think of the eye or skin to feel that 
light and heat are ultimate data; no more do we 
need to think of cerebral excitements to see that 
right and left, before and after, good and bad, one 
and two, like and unlike, are irreducible feelings. 
The categories are senses without organs, or with 
organs unknown. Just as the discrimination of our 
feelings of colour and sound might never have been 
distinct and constant, had we not come upon the 
organs that seem to convey and control them; so 
perhaps our classification of our inner sensations 
will never be settled until their respective organs 
are discovered; for psychology has always been 
physiological, without knowing it. But this truth 
remains — quite apart from physical conceptions, 
not to speak of metaphysical materialism — that 
whatever the historical conditions of any state of 
mind may be said to be, it exists, when it does 
exist, immediately and absolutely; each of its dis- 



EXPRESSION 201 

tinguishable parts might conceivably have been 
absent from it; and its character, as well as its 
existence, is a mere datum of sense. 

The pleasure that belongs to the consciousness of 
relations is therefore as immediate as any other; in- 
deed, our emotional consciousness is always single, 
but we treat it as a resultant of many and even of 
conflicting feelings because we look at it histori- 
cally with a view to comprehending it, and distrib- 
ute it into as many factors as we find objects or 
causes to which to attribute it. The pleasure of asso- 
ciation is an immediate feeling, which we account 
for by its relation to a feeling in the past, or to 
cerebral structure modified by a former experience; 
just as memory itself, which we explain by a refer- 
ence to the past, is a peculiar complication of 
present consciousness. 

§ 60. These reflections may make less km» of *<*/«• 
surprising to us what is the most strik- £ rm * ** eon 
ing fact about the philosophy of expres- 
sion; namely, that the value acquired by the 
expressive thing is often of an entirely different 
kind from that which the thing expressed pos- 
sesses. The expression of physical pleasure, of 
passion, or even of pain, may constitute beauty 
and please the beholder. Thus the value of the 
second term may be physical, or practical, or even 
negative; and it may be transmuted, as it passes to 
the first term, into a value at once positive and 
aesthetic. The transformation of practical values 
into ®sthetio has often been noted, and has even 



202 THE SENSE OF BEAUTY 

led to the theory that beauty is utility seen at arm's 
length; a premonition of pleasure and prosperity, 
much as smell is a premonition of taste. The trans- 
formation of negative values into positive has nat- 
urally attracted even more attention, and given rise 
to various theories of the comic, tragic, and sub- 
lime. For these three species of aesthetic good 
seem to please us by the suggestion of evil; and 
the problem arises how a mind can be made hap- 
pier by having suggestions of unhappiness stirred 
within it; an unhappiness it cannot understand 
without in some degree sharing in it. We must 
now turn to the analysis of this question. 

The expressiveness of a smile is not discovered 
exactly through association of images. The child 
smiles (without knowing it) when he feels pleas- 
ure; and the nurse smiles back; his own pleasure 
is associated with her conduct, and her smile is 
therefore expressive of pleasure. The fact of his 
pleasure at her smile is the ground of his instinc- 
tive belief in her pleasure in it. For this reason 
the circumstances expressive of happiness are not 
those that are favourable to it in reality, but those 
that are congruous with it in idea. The green of 
spring, the bloom of youth, the variability of child- 
hood, the splendour of wealth and beauty, all these 
are symbols of happiness, not because they have 
been known to accompany it in fact, — for they do 
not, any more than their opposites, — but because 
they produce an image and echo of it in us aestheti- 
cally. We believe those things to be happy which 
it makes us happy to think of or to see; the belief in 



SZPEB88ION 208 

the blessedness of the supreme being itself has no 
other foundation. Our joy in the thought of omni- 
science makes us attribute joy to the possession of 
it, which it would in fact perhaps be very far from 
involving or even allowing. 

The expressiveness of forms has a value as a 
sign of the life that actually inhabits those forms 
only when they resemble our own body ; it is 
then probable that similar conditions of body 
involve, in them and in us, similar emotions; 
and we should not long continue to regard as 
the expression of pleasure an attitude that we 
know, by experience in our own person, to ac- 
company pain. Children, indeed, may innocently 
torture animals, not having enough sense of anal- 
ogy to be stopped by the painful suggestions of 
their wri things; and, although in a rough way we 
soon correct these crying misinterpretations by a 
better classification of experience, we nevertheless 
remain essentially subject to the same error. We 
cannot escape it, because the method which involves 
it is the only one that justifies belief in objective 
consciousness at all. Analogy of bodies helps us 
to distribute and classify the life we conceive about 
us; but what leads us to conceive it is the direct 
association of our own feeling with images of things, 
an association which precedes any clear represen- 
tation of our own gestures and attitude. I know 
that smiles mean pleasure before I have caught 
myself smiling in the glass; they mean pleasure 
because they give it. 

Sinoe these aesthetic effects include some of the 



204 THE SENSE OF BEAUTY 

most moving and profound beauties, philosophers 
hare not been slow to torn the unanalyzed paradox 
of their formation into a principle, and to explain 
by it the presence and necessity of evil. As in the 
tragic and the sublime, they have thought, the suf- 
ferings and dangers to which a hero is exposed 
seem to add to his virtue and dignity, and to our 
sacred joy in the contemplation of him, so the 
sundry evils of life may be elements in the tran- 
scendent glory of the whole. And once fired by 
this thought, those who pretend to justify the ways 
of God to man have, naturally, not stopped to con- 
sider whether so edifying a phenomenon was not a 
hasty illusion. They have, indeed, detested any 
attempt to explain it rationally, as tending to ob- 
scure one of the moral laws of the universe. In 
venturing, therefore, to repeat such an attempt, we 
should not be too sanguine of success; for we have 
to encounter not only the intrinsic difficulties of 
the problem, but also a wide-spread and arrogant 
metaphysical prejudice. 

For the sake of greater clearness we may begin 
by classifying the values that can enter into ex- 
pression; we shall then be better able to judge 
by what combinations of them various well-known 
effects and emotions are produced. The intrinsic 
value of the first term can be entirely neglected, 
since it does not contribute to expression. It 
does, however, contribute greatly to the beauty 
of the expressive object. The first term is the 
source of stimulation, and the acuteness and pleas- 
antness of this determine to a great extent the 



EXPRESSION 206 

charaoter and sweep of the associations that will 
be aroused. Very often the pleasantness of the 
medium will counterbalance the disagreeableness of 
the import^ and expressions, in themselves hideous 
or inappropriate, may be excused for the sake of 
the object that conveys them. A beautiful voice 
will redeem a vulgar song, a beautiful colour and 
texture an unmeaning composition. Beauty in the 
first term — beauty of sound, rhythm, and image 
— will make any thought whatever poetic, while 
no thought whatever can be so without that imme- 
diate beauty of presentation. 1 

§ 61. That the noble associations of Msthtue oaim 
any object should embellish that object £,m! ""^ 
is very comprehensible. Homer fur- 
nishes us with a good illustration of the constant 
employment of this effect. The first term, one need 
hardly say, leaves with him little to be desired. 
The verse is beautiful. Sounds, images, and com- 
position conspire to stimulate and delight. This 
immediate beauty is sometimes used to clothe 
things terrible and sad; there is no dearth of the 
tragic in Homer. But the tendency of his poetry 
is nevertheless to fill the outskirts of our conscious- 

1 Curiously enough, common speech here reverses our use of 
terms, because it looks at the matter from the practical instead 
of from the aesthetic point of view, regarding (very unpsycho* 
logically) the thought as the source of the image, not the image 
as the source of the thought. People call the words the expres- 
sion of the thought : whereas for the observer, the hearer (and 
generally for the speaker, too), the words are the datum and 
the thought is their expressiveness — that which they suggest. 



206 1HB SBNdS OF BEAUTY 

ness with the trooping images of things no less fair 
and noble than the Terse itself. The heroes are 
virtuous. There is none of importance who is not 
admirable in his way. The palaces, the arms, the 
horses, the sacrifices, are always excellent. The 
women are always stately and beautiful. The an- 
oestry and the history of every one are honourable 
and good. The whole Homeric world is clean, 
clear, beautiful, and providential, and no small 
part of the perennial charm of the poet is that he 
thus immerses us in an atmosphere of beauty; a 
beauty not concentrated and reserved for some 
extraordinary sentiment, action, or person, but 
permeating the whole and colouring the common 
world of soldiers and sailors, war and craft, with 
a marvellous freshness and inward glow. There 
is nothing in the associations of life in this world 
or in another to contradict or disturb our delight. 
All is beautiful, and beautiful through and through. 
Something of this quality meets us in all simple 
and idyllic compositions. There is, for instance, a 
popular demand that stories and tamedies should 
"end well." The hero and heroine must be young 
and handsome; unless they die, — which is another 
matter, — they must not in the end be poor. The 
landscape in the play must be beautiful; the 
dresses pretty; the plot without serious mishap. 
A pervasive presentation of pleasure must give 
warmth and ideality to the whole. In the pro- 
prieties of social life we find the same principle; 
we study to make our surroundings, manner, and 
conversation suggest nothing but what is pleasing. 



KXFBE88ION 207 

We hide the ugly and disagreeable portion of our 
lives, and do not allow the least hint of it to come 
to light upon festive and public occasions. When- 
ever, in a word, a thoroughly pleasing effect is 
found, it is found by the expression, as well as 
presentation, of what is in itself pleasing — and 
when this effect is to be produced artificially, 
we attain it by the suppression of all expression 
that is not suggestive of something good. 

If our consciousness were exclusively aesthetic, 
this kind of expression would be the only one 
allowed in art or prized in nature. We should 
avoid as a shock or an insipidity, the suggestion 
of anything not intrinsically beautiful. As there 
would be no values not aesthetic, our pleasure could 
never be heightened by any other kind of interest. 
But as contemplation is actually a luxury in our 
lives, and things interest us chiefly on passionate 
and practical grounds, the accumulation of values 
too exclusively aesthetic produces in our minds an 
effect of closeness and artificiality. So selective a 
diet cloys, and our palate, accustomed to much daily 
vinegar and salt, is surfeited by such unmixed sweet. 

Instead we prefer to see through the medium of 
art — through the beautiful first term of our ex- 
pression — the miscellaneous world which is so 
well known to us — perhaps so dear, and at any rate 
so inevitable, an object. We are more thankful for 
this presentation of the unlovely truth in a lovely 
form, than for the like presentation of an abstract 
beauty; what is lost in the purity of the pleasure 
is gained in the stimulation of our attention, and 



206 THE SENSE OF BEAUTY 

in the relief of Tie wing with aesthetic detachment 
the same things that in practical life hold tyran- 
nous dominion oyer our souls. The beauty that is 
associated only with other beauty is therefore a 
sort of aesthetic dainty; it leads the fancy through 
a fairyland of lovely forms, where we must forget 
the common objects of our interest. The charm of 
such an idealization is undeniable; but the other 
important elements of our memory and will cannot 
long be banished. Thoughts of labour, ambition, 
lust,/ anger, confusion, sorrow, and death must 
needs mix with our contemplation and lend their 
various expressions to the objects with which in 
experience they are so closely allied. Hence the 
incorporation in the beautiful of values of other 
sorts, and the comparative rareness in nature or 
art of expressions the second term of which has 
only aesthetic value. 

Practical otUme § 62. More important and frequent is 
•oMt. ^ ^^^ ^ ^ e expression of utility. 
This is found whenever the second term is the idea 
of something of practical advantage to us, the pre- 
monition of which brings satisfaction; and this 
satisfaction prompts an approval of the presented 
object. The tone of our consciousness is raised 
by the foretaste of a success; and this heightened 
pleasure is objectified in the present image, since 
the associated image to which the satisfaction prop- 
erly belongs often fails to become distinct. We do 
not conceive clearly what this practical advantage 
will be; but the vague sense that an advantage is 



EXPRESSION 309 

there, that something desirable has been done, ac- 
companies the presentation, and gives it expression. 

The case that most resembles that of which we 
have been just speaking, is perhaps that in which 
the second term is a piece of interesting information, 
a theory, or other intellectual datum. Our interest 
in facts and theories, when not aesthetic, is of course 
practical; it consists in their connexion with our 
interests, and in the service they can render us in 
the execution of our designs. Intellectual values 
are utilitarian in their origin but aesthetic in their 
form, since the advantage of knowledge is often lost 
sight of, and ideas are prized for their own sake. 
Curiosity can become a disinterested passion, and 
yield intimate and immediate satisfaction like any 
other impulse. 

When we have before us, for instance, a fine 
map, in which the line of coast, now rocky, now 
sandy, is clearly indicated, together with the wind- 
ings of the rivers, the elevations of the land, and 
the distribution of the population, we have the sim- 
ultaneous suggestion of so many facts, the sense 
of mastery over so much reality, that we gaze 
at it with delight, and need no practical motive to 
keep us studying it, perhaps for hours together. 
A map is not naturally thought of as an aesthetic 
object; it is too exclusively expressive. The first 
term is passed over as a mere symbol, and the mind 
is filled either with imaginations of the landscape 
the country would really offer, or with thoughts 
about its history and inhabitants. These circum- 
stances prevent the ready objectification of our 



210 THE 8ENU OF BEAUTY 

pleasure in the map itself. And yet, let the tints of 
it be a little subtle, let the lines be a little delicate, 
and the masses of land and sea somewhat balanced, 
and we really have a beautiful thing; a thing the 
charm of which consists almost entirely in its mean- 
ing, but which nevertheless pleases us in the same 
way as a picture or a graphic symbol might please. 
Give the symbol a little intrinsic worth of form, 
line, and colour, and it attracts like a magnet all 
the values of the things it is known to symbolize. 
It becomes beautiful in its expressiveness. 

Hardly different from this example is that of 
travel or of reading; for in these employments we 
get many aesthetic pleasures, the origin of which 
is in the satisfaction of curiosity and intelligence. 
When we say admiringly of anything that it is 
characteristic, that it embodies a whole period or 
a whole man, we are absorbed by the pleasant 
sense that it offers innumerable avenues of approach 
to interesting and important things. The less we 
are able to specify what these are, the more beau- 
tiful will the object be that expresses them. For 
if we could specify them, the felt value would 
disintegrate, and distribute itself among the ideas 
of the suggested things, leaving the expressive 
object bare of all interest, like the letters of a 
printed page. 

The courtiers of Philip the Second probably 
did not regard his rooms at the Escurial as par- 
ticularly interesting, but simply as small, ugly, 
and damp. The character which we find in them 
and which makes us regard them as eminently 



EXPRESSION Ml 

expressive of whatever was sinister in the man, 
probably did not strike them. They knew the 
king, and had before them words, gestures, and 
acts enough in which to read his character. But 
all these living facts are wanting to our experi- 
ence; and it is the suggestion of them in their 
unrealizable vagueness that fills the apartments of 
the monarch with such pungent expression. It is 
not otherwise with all emphatic expressiveness — 
moonlight and castle moats, minarets and cypresses, 
camels filing through the desert — such images get 
their character from the strong but misty atmos- 
phere of sentiment and adventure which clings 
about them. The profit of travel, and the extraor* 
dinary charm of all visible relics of antiquity, 
consists in the acquisition of images in which to 
focus a mass of discursive knowledge, not otherwise 
felt together. Such images are concrete symbols 
of much latent experience, and the deep roots of 
association give them the same hold upon our atten- 
tion which might be secured by a fortunate form or 
splendid material. 

$ 53. There is one consideration om* ««*«/•- 
which often adds much to the interest m9Wi **<***• 
with which we view an object, but which we 
might be virtuously inclined not to admit among 
aesthetic values. I mean cost. Cost is practical 
value expressed in abstract terms, quid from the 
price of anything we can often infer what rela- 
tion it has to the desires and efforts of mankind. 
There is no reason why cost, or the circumstances 



212 THB SENSE OW BEAUTY 

which are its basis, should net, like other prac- 
tical Tataes, heighten the tone of consciousness, 
aqd add to the pleasure with which we view an 
object. In fact, such is our daily experience; for 
great as is the sensuous beauty of gems, their 
rarity and price adds an expression of distinction 
to them, which they would never hare if they were 
cheap. 

The circumstance that makes the appreciation 
of cost often unaesthetic is the abstractness of that 
quality. The price of an object is an algebraic 
symbol, it is a conventional term, invented to 
facilitate our operations, which remains arid and 
unmeaning if we stop with it and forget to 
translate it again at the end into its concrete 
equivalent. The commercial mind dwells in that 
intermediate limbo of symbolized values; the cal- 
culator's senses are muffled by his intellect and 
by his habit of abbreviated thinking. His mental 
process is a reckoning that loses sight of its original 
values, and is over without reaching any concrete 
image. Therefore the knowledge of cost, when 
expressed in terms of money, is incapable of con- 
tributing to aesthetic effect, but the reason is not 
so much that the suggested value is not aesthetic, 
as that no real value is suggested at all. No 
object of any kind is presented to the mind by 
the numerical expression. If we reinterpret our 
price, however, and translate it back into the facts 
which constitute it, into the materials employed, 
their original place and quality, and the labour 
and art which transformed them into the present 



EXPRESSION 313 

thing, then we add to the aesthetic value of the 
object, by the expression which we find in it, not 
of its price in money, but of its human cost. We 
have now the consciousness of the real values 
which it represents, and these values, sympatheti- 
ually present to the fancy, increase our present 
interest and admiration. 

I believe economists count among the elements of 
the value of an object the rarity of its material, the 
labour of its manufacture, and the distance from 
which it is brought. Now all these qualities, if at- 
tended to in themselves, appeal greatly to the imagi- 
nation. We have a natural interest in what is rare 
and affects us with unusual sensations. What comes 
from a far country carries our thoughts there, and 
gains by the wealth and picturesqueness of its 
associations. And that on which human labour 
has been spent, especially if it was a labour of 
love, and is apparent in the product, has one of 
the deepest possible claims to admiration. So 
that the standard of cost, the most vulgar of all 
standards, is such only when it remains empty 
and abstract. Let the thoughts wander back and 
consider the elements of value, and our apprecia- 
tion, from being verbal and commercial, becomes 
poetio and real. 

We have in this one more example of the manner 
in which practical values, when suggested by and 
incorporated in any object, contribute to its beauty. 
Our sense of what lies behind, unlovely though 
that background may be, gives interest and poig- 
nancy to that which is present; our attention and 



314 THE SENSE OF BEAUTY 

wonder an engaged, and a new *»f^fcg and 
importance is added to such intrinsic beauty aa 
the presentation may possess. 

7ft*«pv««fr« {64. The same principle explains the 
ZtT/toZZ. *&*<* <rf evident cleanliness, security, 
economy, and comfort. This Dutch 
charm hardly needs explanation; we are conscious 
of the domesticity and neatness which pleases us 
in it. There are few things more utterly discom- 
forting to our minds than waste: it is a sort of 
pungent extract and quintessence of folly. The 
risible manifestation of it is therefore very offen- 
sive; and that of its absence very reassuring. The 
force of our approval of practical fitness and econ- 
omy in things rises into an appreciation that is 
half -aesthetic, and which becomes wholly so when 
the fit form becomes fixed in a type, to the lines 
of which we are accustomed; so that the practical 
necessity of the form is heightened and concen- 
trated into the aesthetic propriety of it. 

The much-praised expression of function and 
truth in architectural works reduces itself to this 
principle. The useful contrivance at first appeals 
to our practical approval; while we admire its 
ingenuity f we cannot fail to become gradually 
accustomed to its presence, and to register with 
attentive pleasure the relation of its parts. Util- 
ity! as we have pointed out in its place, is thus 
the guiding principle in the determination of 
forms. 

The recurring observation of the utility, econ- 



EXPRESSION 216 

omy, and fitness of the traditional arrangement in 
buildings or other products of arty re-enforces this 
formal expectation with a reflective approval. We 
are accustomed, for instance, to sloping roofs; the 
fact that they were necessary has made them 
familiar, and the fact that they are familiar has 
made them objects of study and of artistic enjoy- 
ment. If at any moment, however, the notion of 
condemning them passes through the mind, — if we 
have visions of the balustrade against the sky, — 
we revert to our homely image with kindly loyalty, 
when we remember the long months of rain and 
snow, and the comfortless leaks to be avoided. 
The thought of a glaring, practical unfitness is 
enough to spoil our pleasure in any form, however 
beautiful intrinsically, while the sense of practical 
fitness is enough to reconcile us to the most awk- 
ward and rude contrivances. 

This principle is, indeed, not a fundamental, but 
an auxiliary one; the expression of utility modifies 
effect, but does not constitute it. There would be 
a kind of superstitious haste in the notion that 
what is convenient and economical is necessarily 
and by miracle beautiful. The uses and habits of 
one place and society require works which are or 
may easily become intrinsically beautiful; the uses 
and habits of another make these beautiful works 
impossible. The beauty has a material and formal 
basis that we have already studied; no fitness of 
design will make a building of ten equal storeys as 
beautiful as a pavilion or a finely proportioned 
tower; no utility will make a steamboat as beau- 



216 THE SENSE OF BEAUTY 

tiful as a sailing vessel. But the forms once 
established, with their various intrinsic charac- 
ters, the fitness we know to exist in them will 
lend them some added charm, or their unfitness 
will disquiet us, and haunt us like a conscien- 
tious qualm. The other interests of our lives here 
mingle with the purely aesthetic, to enrich or to 
embitter it. 

If Sybaris is so sad a name to the memory — and 
who is without some Sybaris of his own? — if the 
image of it is so tormenting and in the end so 
disgusting, this is not because we no longer think 
its marbles bright, its fountains cool, its athletes 
strong, or its roses fragrant; but because, mingled 
with all these supreme beauties, there is the 
ubiquitous shade of Nemesis, the sense of a vacant 
will and a suicidal inhumanity. The intolerable- 
ness of this moral condition poisons the beauty 
which continues to be felt. If this beauty did not 
exist, and was not still desired, the tragedy would 
disappear and Jehovah would be deprived of the 
worth of his victim. The sternness of moral 
forces lies precisely in this, that the sacrifices 
morality imposes upon us are real, that the things 
it renders impossible are still precious. 

We are accustomed to think of prudence as 
estranging us only from low and ignoble things; 
we forget that utility and the need of system in 
our lives is a bar also to the free flights of the 
spirit. The highest instincts tend to disorganiza- 
tion as much as the lowest, since order and benefit 
is what practical morality everywhere insists upon, 



EXPRESSION 217 

while sanctity and genius are as rebellious as vice. 
The constant demands of the heart and the belly 
can allow man only an incidental indulgence in the 
pleasures of the eye and the understanding. For 
this reason, utility keeps close watch over beauty, 
lest in her wilfulness and riot she should offend 
against our practical needs and ultimate happiness. 
And when the conscience is keen, this vigilance 
of the practical imagination over the speculative 
ceases to appear as an eventual and external check. 
The least suspicion of luxury, waste, impurity, or 
cruelty is then a signal for alarm and insurrection. 
That which emits this sapor hcereticus becomes so 
initially horrible, that naturally no beauty can 
ever be discovered in it; the senses and imagination 
are in that case inhibited by the conscience. 

For this reason, the doctrine that beauty is essen- 
tially nothing but the expression of moral or prac- 
tical good appeals to persons of predominant moral 
sensitiveness, not only because they wish it were 
the truth, but because it largely describes the 
experience of their own minds, somewhat warped 
in this particular. It will further be observed 
that the moralists are much more able to condemn 
than to appreciate the effects of the arts. Their 
taste is delicate without being keen, for the prin- 
ciple on which they judge is one which really 
operates to control and extend aesthetic effects; 
it is a source of expression and of certain nuances 
of satisfaction; but it is foreign to the stronger 
and more primitive aesthetic values to which the 
same persons are comparatively blind. 



218 THE SENSE OF BEAUTY 

ni atttimiti §65. The extent to which aesthetic 
2*£rtto.*" r goods should be sacrificed is, of course, 
a moral question; for the function of 
practical reason is to compare, combine, and har- 
monize all our interests, with a view to attaining 
the greatest satisfactions of which our nature is 
capable. We must expect, therefore, that virtue 
should place the same restraint upon all our pas- 
sions — not from superstitious aversion to any one 
need, but from an equal concern for them all. 
The consideration to be given to our aesthetic 
pleasures will depend upon their greater or less 
influence upon our happiness; and as this influence 
varies in different ages and countries, and with 
different individuals, it will be right to let aesthetic 
demands count for more or for less in the organ- 
ization of life. 

We may, indeed, according to our personal sym- 
pathies, prefer one type of creature to another. 
We may love the martial, or the angelic, or the 
politioal temperament. We may delight to find 
in others that balance of susceptibilities and 
enthusiasms which we feel in our own breast. 
But no moral precept can require one species or 
individual to change its nature in order to resem- 
ble another, since such a requirement can have no 
power or authority over those on whom we would 
impose it. All that morality can require is the 
inward harmony of each life: and if we still abhor 
the thought of a possible being who should be 
happy without love, or knowledge, or beauty, the 
aversion we feel is not moral but instinctive, not 



EXPRESSION 219 

rational bat human. What revolts us is not the 
want of excellence in that other creature, but his 
want of affinity to ourselves. Could we survey 
the whole universe, we might indeed assign to 
each species a moral dignity proportionate to its 
general beneficence and inward wealth; but such 
an absolute standard, if it exists, is incommuni- 
cable to us; and we are reduced to judging of the 
excellence of every nature by its relation to the 



All these matters, however, belong to the sphere 
of ethics, nor should we give them here even a 
passing notice, but for the influence which moral 
ideas exert over aesthetic judgments. Our sense 
of practical benefit not only determines the moral 
value of beauty, but sometimes even its existence 
as an aesthetic good. Especially in the right selec- 
tion of effects, these considerations have weight. 
Forms in themselves pleasing may become disa- 
greeable when the practical interests then upper- 
most in the mind cannot, without violence, yield 
a place to them. Thus too much eloquence in a 
diplomatic document, or in a familiar letter, or in 
a prayer, is an offence not only against practical 
sense, but also against taste. The occasion has 
tuned us to a certain key of sentiment, and de- 
prived us of the power to respond to other stimuli. 

If things of moment are before us, we oannot stop 
to play with symbols and figures of speech. We 
oannot attend to them with pleasure, and therefore 
they lose the beauty they might elsewhere have 
had. They are offensive, not in themselves,— 



220 THE SENSE OF BEAUT\ 

for nothing is intrinsically ugly, — but by vir- 
tue of our present demand for something dif- 
ferent. A prison as gay as a bazaar, a church 
as dumb as a prison, offend by their failure to sup- 
port by their aesthetic quality the moral emotion 
with which we approach them. The arts must 
study their occasions; they must stand modestly 
aside until they can slip in fitly into the interstices 
of life. This is the consequence of the superficial 
stratum on which they flourish; their roots, as we 
hare seen, are not deep in the world, and they 
appear only as unstable, superadded activities, 
employments of our freedom, after the work of 
life is done and the terror of it is allayed. They 
must, therefore, fit their forms, like parasites, to 
the stouter growths to which they cling. 

Herein lies the greatest difficulty and nicety of 
art. It must not only create things abstractly 
beautiful, but it must conciliate all the competi- 
tors these may have to the attention of the world, 
and must know how to insinuate their charms 
among the objects of our passion. But this sub- 
serviency and enforced humility of beauty is not 
without its virtue and reward. If the aesthetic 
habit lie under the necessity of respecting and ob- 
serving our passions, it possesses the privilege of 
soothing our griefs. There is no situation so terri- 
ble that it may not be relieved by the momentary 
pause of the mind to contemplate it aesthetically. 

Grief itself becomes in this way not wholly 
pain; a sweetness is added to it by our reflection. 
The saddest scenes may lose their bitterness in 



EXPRESSION 221 

their beauty. This ministration makes, as it were, 
the piety of the Muses, who succour their mother, 
Life, and repay her for their nurture by the com- 
fort of their continual presence. The aesthetic 
world is limited in its scope; it must submit to 
the control of the organizing reason, and not 
trespass upon more useful and holy ground. The 
garden must not encroach upon the corn-fields; 
but the eye of the gardener may transform the 
corn-fields themselves by dint of loving observa- 
tion into a garden of a soberer kind. By finding 
grandeur in our disasters, and merriment in our 
mishaps, the aesthetic sense thus mollifies both, 
and consoles us for the frequent impossibility of 
a serious and perfect beauty. 

§ 66. All subjects, even the most tfgaa* 
repellent, when the circumstances of 9 J^at$rm. 
life thrust them before us, can thus be 
observed with curiosity and treated with art. The 
calling forth of these aesthetic functions softens the 
violence of our sympathetic reaction. If death, for 
instance, did not exist and did not thrust itself 
upon our thoughts with painful importunity, art 
would never have been called upon to soften and 
dignify it, by presenting it in beautiful forms and 
surrounding it with consoling associations. Art 
does not seek out the pathetic, the tragic, and the 
absurd; it is life that has imposed them upon our 
attention, and enlisted art in their service, to make 
the contemplation of them, since it is inevitable, 
at least as tolerable as possible. 



322 THB SEN8B OF BBAUTT 

The agreeableness of the presentation is thus 
mixed with the horror of the thing; and the result 
is that while we are saddened by the truth we are 
delighted by the vehicle that conveys it to us. 
The mixture of these emotions constitutes the 
peculiar flavour and poignancy of pathos. But 
because unlovely objects and feelings are often so 
familiar as to be indifferent or so momentous as to 
be alone in the mind, we are led into the confu- 
sion of supposing that beauty depends upon them 
for its aesthetic value; whereas the truth is that 
only by the addition of positive beauties can these 
evil experiences be made agreeable to contempla- 
tion. 

There is, in reality, no such paradox in the 
tragic, comic, and sublime, as has been sometimes 
supposed. We are not pleased by virtue of the 
suggested evils, but in spite of them; and if ever 
the charm of the beautiful presentation sinks so 
low, or the vividness of the represented evil rises 
so high, that the balance is in favour of pain, at 
that very moment the whole object becomes hor- 
rible, passes out of the domain of art, and can be 
justified only by its scientific or moral uses. As 
an aesthetic value it is destroyed; it ceases to be a 
benefit; and the author of it, if he were not made 
harmless by the neglect that must soon overtake 
him, would have to be punished as a malefactor 
who adds to the burden of mortal life. For the 
sad, the ridiculous, the grotesque, and the terrible, 
unless they become Aesthetic goods, remain moral 
evils. 



KXPKB88IOH 22* 

We have, therefore, to study the various orthotic, 
intellectual, and moral compensations by which the 
mind can be brought to contemplate with pleasure 
a thing which, if experienced alone, would be the 
cause of pain. There is, to be sure, a way of 
avoiding this inquiry. We might assert that since 
all moderate excitement is pleasant, there is noth- 
ing strange in the fact that the representation of 
evil should please ; for the experience is evil by vir- 
tue of the pain it gives ; but it gives pain only when 
felt with great intensity. Observed from afar, it is 
a pleasing impression; it is vivid enough to interest, 
but not acute enough to wound. This simple expla- 
nation is possible in all those cases where ssthetic 
effect is gained by the inhibition of sympathy. 

The term "evil" is often a conventional epithet; 
a conflagration may be called an evil, because it 
usually involves loss and suffering; but if, without 
caring for a loss and suffering we do not share, we 
are delighted by the blaze, and still say that what 
pleases us is an evil, we are using this word as a 
conventional appellation, not as the mark of a felt 
value. We are not pleased by an evil; we are 
pleased by a vivid and exciting sensation, which is 
a good, but which has for objective cause an event 
which may indeed be an evil to others, but about 
the consequences of which we are not thinking at 
all. There is, in this sense, nothing in all nature, 
perhaps, which is not an evil; nothing which is not 
unfavourable to some interest, and does not involve 
some infinitesimal or ultimate suffering in the uni- 
verse of life. 



224 THB SENSE OF BEAUTY 

But when we are ignorant or thoughtless, this 
suffering is to us as if it did not exist. The pleas- 
ures of drinking and walking are not tragic to us, 
because we may be poisoning some bacillus or crush- 
ing some worm. To an ominiscient intelligence 
such acts may be tragic by virtue of the insight 
into their relations to conflicting impulses; but 
unless these impulses are present to the same 
mind, there is no consciousness of tragedy. The 
child that, without understanding of the calamity, 
should watch a shipwreck from the shore, would 
have a simple emotion of pleasure as from a 
jumping jack; what passes for tragic interest is 
often nothing but this. If he understood the 
event, but was entirely without sympathy, he 
would have the aesthetic emotion of the careless 
tyrant, to whom the notion of suffering is no hin- 
drance to the enjoyment of the lyre. If the temper 
of his tyranny were purposely cruel, he might add 
to that aesthetic delight the luxury of Schaden- 
freude; but the pathos and horror of the sight 
could only appeal to a man who realized and 
shared the sufferings he beheld. 

A great deal of brutal tragedy has been endured 
in the world because the rudeness of the represen- 
tation, or of the public, or of both, did not allow a 
really sympathetic reaction to arise. We all smile 
when Punch beats Judy in the puppet show. The 
treatment and not the subject is what makes a trag- 
edy. A parody of Hamlet or of King Lear would 
not be a tragedy; and these tragedies themselves 
are not wholly such! but by the strain of wit and 



J 



EXPRESSION 225 

nonsense they contain are, as it were, occasional 
parodies on themselves. By treating a tragic sub- 
ject bombastically or satirically we can turn it into 
an amusement for the public ; they will not feel the 
griefs which we have been careful to harden them 
against by arousing in them contrary emotions. A 
work, nominally a work of art, may also appeal to 
non-aesthetic feelings by its political bias, brutality, 
or obscenity. But if an effect of true pathos is 
sought, the sympathy of the observer must be 
aroused; we must awaken in him the emotion we 
describe. The intensity of the impression must 
not be so slight that its painful quality is not felt; 
for it is this very sense of pain, mingling with the 
aesthetic excitement of the spectacle, that gives it 
a tragic or pathetic colouring. 

We cannot therefore rest in the assertion that 
the slighter degree of excitement is pleasant, when 
a greater degree of the same would be disagreeable; 
for that principle does not express the essence of 
the matter, which is that we must be aware of the 
evil, and conscious of it as such, absorbed more or 
less in the experience of the sufferer, and conse- 
quently suffering ourselves, before we can experi- 
ence the essence of tragic emotion. This emotion 
must therefore be complex; it must contain an 
element of pain overbalanced by an element of 
pleasure; in our delight there must be a distin- 
guishable touch of shrinking and sorrow; for it is 
this conflict and rending of our will, this fascina- 
tion by what is intrinsically terrible or sad, that 
gives these turbid feelings their depth and pungency. 



226 THK SENSE OF BEAUTY 

/jtfhrtnMc/ $ 67. A striking proof of the eon* 
m'tHi'&ZZi'nt pound nature of tragic effects can be 
ww/o«*/ given by a simple experiment. Remove 
from any drama — say from Othdlo — 
the charm of the medium of presentation; re- 
duce the tragedy to a mere account of the facts and 
of the words spoken, such as our newspapers almost 
daily contain; and the tragic dignity and beauty 
is entirely lost. Nothing remains but a disheart- 
ening item of human folly, which may still excite 
curiosity, but which will rather defile than purify 
the mind that considers it. A French poet has 

said: 

H n'est de Tulgaire chagrin 

Que oelui d'une ime Yttlgaire. 

The counterpart of this maxim is equally true. 
There is no noble sorrow except in a noble mind, 
because what is noble is the reaction upon the 
sorrow, the attitude of the man in its presence, 
the language in which he clothes it, the associa- 
tions with which he surrounds it, and the fine 
affections and impulses which shine through it. 
Only by suffusing some sinister experience with 
this moral light, S3 a poet may do who carries 
that light within him, can we raise misfortune 
into tragedy and make it better for us to remem- 
ber our lives than to forget them. 

There are times, although rare, when men are 
noble in the very moment of passion: when that 
passion is not unqualified, but already mastered by 
reflection and levelled with truth. Then the ex- 
perience is itself the tragedy, and no poet is needed 



*XFRB88I0N 337 

to make it beautiful in representation, since the 
sufferer has been an artist himself, and has moulded 
what he has endured. But usually these two 
stages have to be successive: first we suffer, after- 
wards we sing. An interval is necessary to make 
feeling presentable, and subjugate it to that form 
in which alone it is beautiful. 

This form appeals to us in itself, and without 
its aid no subject-matter could become an esthetic 
object. The more terrible the experience de- 
scribed, the more powerful must the art be which 
is to transform it. For this reason prose and 
literalness are more tolerable in comedy than in 
tragedy; any violent passion, any overwhelming 
pain, if it is not to make us think of a demonstra- 
tion in pathology, and bring back the smell of 
ether, must be rendered in the most exalted style. 
Metre, rhyme, melody, the widest flights of allu- 
sion, the highest reaches of fancy, are there in 
place. For these enable the mind swept by the 
deepest cosmic harmonies, to endure and absorb 
the shrill notes which would be intolerable in a 
poorer setting. 

The sensuous harmony of words, and still more 
the effects of rhythm, are indispensable at this 
height of emotion. Evolutionists have said that 
violent emotion naturally expresses itself in 
rhythm, That is hardly an empirical observa- 
tion, nor can the expressiveness of rhythms be 
made definite enough to bear specific association 
with complex feelings. But the suspension and 
rush of sound and movement have in themselves 



228 THE 8ENSE OF BEAUTY 

a strong effect; we cannot undergo them without 
profound excitement; and this, like martial musio, 
nerves us to courage and, by a sort of intoxication! 
bears us along amid scenes which might otherwise 
be sickening. The vile effect of literal and dis- 
jointed renderings of suffering, whether in writing 
or acting, proves how necessary is the musical 
quality to tragedy — a fact Aristotle long ago set 
forth. The afflatus of rhythm, even if it be the 
pomp of the Alexandrine, sublimates the passion, 
and clarifies its mutterings into poetry. This 
breadth and rationality are necessary to art, which 
is not skill merely, but skill in the service of 
beauty. 

mxtmvf $ 68. To the value of these sensuous 

•/^,^>»c££ and formal elements must be added the 
£***«*•/ continual suggestion of beautiful and 
happy things, which no tragedy is som- 
bre enough to exclude. Even if we do not go so 
far as to intersperse comic scenes and phrases into 
a pathetic subject, — a rude device, since the comic 
passages themselves need that purifying which 
they are meant to effect, — we must at least relieve 
our theme with pleasing associations. For this 
reason we have palaces for our scene, rank, beauty, 
and virtue in our heroes, nobility in their passions 
and in their fate, and altogether a sort of glorifica- 
tion of life without which tragedy would lose both 
in depth of pathos— since things so precious are 
destroyed — and in subtlety of charm, since things 
so precious are manifested. 



EXPRESSION 229 

Indeed, one of the chief charms that tragedies 
hare is the suggestion of what they might hate 
been if they had not been tragedies. The happi- 
ness which glimmers through them, the hopes, 
loves, and ambitions of which it is made, these 
things fascinate us, and win our sympathy; so 
that we are all the more willing to suffer with our 
heroes, even if we are at the same time all the 
more sensitive to their suffering. Too wicked a 
character or too unrelieved a situation revolts us 
for this reason. We do not find enough expression 
of good to make us endure the expression of the 
evil. 

A curious exception to this rule, which, however, 
admirably illustrates the fundamental principle of 
it, is where by the diversity of evils represented 
the mind is relieved from painful absorption in any 
of them. There is a scene in King Lear, where the 
horror of the storm is made to brood over at least 
four miseries, that of the king, of the fool, of Edgar 
in his real person, and of Edgar in his assumed 
character. The vividness of each of these por- 
trayals, with its different note of pathos, keeps 
the mind detached and free, forces it to compare 
and reflect, and thereby to universalize the spec- 
tacle. Tet even here, the beautiful effect is not 
secured without some touches of good. How much 
is not gained by the dumb fidelity of the fool, and 
by the sublime humanity of Lear, when he says, 
"Art cold? There is a part of me is sorry for 
thee yet." 

Tet all these compensations would probably be 



330 THE SENSE OF BEAUTY 

unavailing but for another which the saddest things 
often have, — the compensation of being true. Our 
practical and intellectual nature is deeply inter- 
ested in truth. What describes fact appeals to us 
for that reason; it has an inalienable interest. 
However unpleasant truth may prove, we long to 
know it, partly perhaps because experience has 
shown us the prudence of this kind of intellectual 
courage, and chiefly because the consciousness of 
ignorance and the dread of the unknown is more 
tormenting than any possible discovery. A primi- 
tive instinct makes us turn the eyes full on any 
object that appears in the dim borderland of our 
field of vision — and this all the more quickly, the 
more terrible that object threatens to be. 

This physical thirst for seeing has its intellectual 
extension. We covet truth, and to attain it, amid 
all accidents, is a supreme satisfaction. Now this 
satisfaction the representation of evil can also 
afford. Whether we hear the account of some 
personal accident, or listen to the symbolic repre- 
sentation of the inherent tragedy of life, we crave 
the same knowledge; the desire for truth makes 
us welcome eagerly whatever comes in its name. 
To be sure, the relief of such instruction does not 
of itself constitute an aesthetic pleasure : the other 
conditions of beauty remain to be fulfilled. But 
the satisfaction of so imperious an intellectual 
instinct insures our willing attention to the tragic 
object, and strengthens the hold which any beauties 
it may possess will take upon us. An intellectual 
value stands ready to be transmuted into an ses- 



EXPRESSION 331 

thetic one, if once its discursiveness is lost, and it 
is left hanging about the object as a vague sense 
of dignity and meaning. 

To this must be added the specific pleasure of 
recognition, one of the keenest we have, and the 
sentimental one of nursing our own griefs and 
dignifying them by assimilation to a less inglo- 
rious representation of them. Here we have truth 
on a small scale; conformity in the fiction to 
incidents of our personal experience. Such cor- 
respondences are the basis of much popular ap- 
preciation of trivial and undigested works that 
appeal to some momentary phase of life or feel- 
ing, and disappear with it. They have the value 
of personal stimulants only; they never achieve 
beauty. Like the souvenirs of last season's gaye- 
ties, or the diary of an early love, they are often 
hideous in themselves in proportion as they are 
redolent with personal associations. But however 
hopelessly mere history or confession may fail to 
constitute a work of art, a work of art that has an 
historical warrant, either literal or symbolical, 
gains the support of that vivid interest we have in 
facts. And many tragedies and farces, that to a 
mind without experience of this sublunary world 
might seem monstrous and disgusting fictions, may 
come to be forgiven and even perhaps preferred 
over all else, when they are found to be a sketch 
from life. 

Truth is thus the excuse which ugliness has 
for being. Many people, in whom the pursuit 
of knowledge and the indulgence in sentiment 



932 the ram or beauty 

hare left no room for the cultivation of the «- 
thetie sense, look in art rather for this expres- 
sion of fact or of passion than for the revelation 
of beauty. They accordingly produce and admire 
works without intrinsic value. They employ the 
procedure of the fine arts without an eye to what 
can giro pleasure in the effect. They invoke rather 
the a priori interest which men are expected to 
hare in the subject-matter, or in the theories and 
moral implied in the presentation of it. Instead 
of using the allurements of art to inspire wisdom, 
they require an appreciation of wisdom to make us 
endure their lack of art. 

Of course, the instruments of the arts are 
public property and any one is free to turn them 
to new uses. It would be an interesting devel- 
opment of civilization if they should now be 
employed only as methods of recording scientific 
ideas and personal confessions. But the experi- 
ment has not succeeded and can hardly succeed. 
There are other simpler, clearer, and more satis- 
fying ways of expounding truth. A man who 
is really a student of history or philosophy will 
never rest with the vague and partial oracles of 
poetry, not to speak of the inarticulate sugges- 
tions of the plastic arts. He will at once make 
for the principles which art cannot ^ express, 
even if it can embody them, and when those prin- 
ciples are attained, the works of art, if they had 
no other value than that of suggesting them, will 
lapse from his mind. Forms will give place to 
formulas as hieroglyphics have given place to the 
letters of the alphabet. 



EXPRESSION 233 

If, on the other hand, the primary interest is 
really in beauty, and only the confusion of a 
moral revolution has obscured for a while the 
vision of the ideal, then as the mind regains 
its mastery over the world, and digests its new 
experience, the imagination will again be liber- 
ated, and create its forms by its inward affini- 
ties, leaving all the weary burden, archaeological, 
psychological, and ethical, to those whose busi- 
ness is not to delight. But the sudden inunda- 
tion of science and sentiment which has made 
the mind of the nineteenth century so confused, 
by overloading us with materials and breaking 
up our habits of apperception and our ideals, 
has led to an exclusive sense of the value of 
expressiveness, until this has been almost iden- 
tified with beauty. This exaggeration can best 
prove how the expression of truth may enter into 
the play of aesthetic forces, and give a value to 
representations which, but for it, would be re- 
pulsive. 

J 69. Hitherto we have been consid- Tk» itbnatkn 
ering those elements of a pathetic pres- 
entation which may mitigate our sympathetic 
emotion, and make it on the whole agreeable. 
These consist in the intrinsic beauties of the 
medium of presentation, and in the concomitant 
manifestation of various goods, notably of truth. 
The mixture of these values is perhaps all we have 
in mildly pathetic works, in the presence of which 
we are tolerably aware of a sort of balance and 



234 THE SENSE OF BEAUTY 

compensation of emotions. The sorrow and the 
beauty, the hopelessness and the consolation, min- 
gle and merge into a kind of joy which has its 
poignancy, indeed, but which is far too passive 
and penitential to contain the loader and sublimer 
of our tragic moods. In these there is a whole- 
ness, a strength, and a rapture, which still demands 
an explanation. 

Where this explanation is to be found may 
be guessed from the following circumstance. The 
pathetic is a quality of the object, at once lov- 
able and sad, which we accept and allow to flow 
in upon the soul; but the heroic is an attitude 
of the will, by which the voices of the outer 
wor}d are silenced, and a moral energy, flowing 
from within, is made to triumph over them. If 
we fail, therefore, to discover, by analysis of the 
object, anything which could make it sublime, we 
must not be surprised at our failure. We must re- 
member that the object is always but a portion of 
our consciousness : that portion which has enough 
coherence and articulation to be recognized as per- 
manent and projected into the outer world. But 
consciousness remains one, in spite of this diversi- 
fication of its content, and the object is not really 
independent, but is in constant relation to the rest 
of the mind, in the midst of which it swims like a 
bubble on a dark surface of water. 

The aesthetic effect of objects is always due to the 
total emotional value of the consciousness in which 
they exist. We merely attribute this value to the 
object by a projection which is the ground of the 



EXPRESSION 335 

apparent objectivity of beauty. Sometimes this 
value may be inherent in the process by which the 
object itself is perceived; then we have sensuous 
and formal beauty; sometimes the value may 
be due to the incipient formation of other ideas, 
which the perception of this object evokes; then we 
have beauty of expression. But among the ideas 
with which every object has relation there is one 
vaguest, most comprehensive, and most powerful 
one, namely, the idea of self. The impulses, mem- 
ories, principles, and energies which we designate 
by that word baffle enumeration; indeed, they con- 
stantly fade and change into one another; and 
whether the self is anything, everything, or noth- 
ing depends on the aspect of it which we momen- 
tarily fix, and especially on the definite object with 
which we contrast it. 

Now, it is the essential privilege of beauty to so 
synthesize and bring to a focus the various impulses 
of the self, so to suspend them to a single image, 
that a great peace falls upon that perturbed king- 
dom. In the experience of these momentary har- 
monies we have the basis of the enjoyment of beauty, 
and of all its mystical meanings. But there are 
always two methods of securing harmony: one is 
to unify all the given elements, and another is to 
reject and expunge all the elements that refuse to 
be unified. Unity by inclusion gives us the beau- 
tiful; unity by exclusion, opposition, and isolation 
gives us the sublime. Both are pleasures : but the 
pleasure of the one is warm, passive, and pervasive; 
that of the other cold, imperious, and keen. The 



206 THE SENSE OF BEAUTY 

one identifies ui with the world, the other raises 
iia above it. 

There can be no difficulty in understanding how 
the expression of evil in the object may be the 
occasion of this heroic reaction of the soul. In the 
first place, the evil may be felt; but at the same 
time the sense that, great as it may be in itself, 
it cannot touch us, may stimulate extraordinarily 
the consciousness of our own wholeness. This is 
the sublimity which Lucretius calls " sweet" in the 
famous lines in which he so justly analyzes it. 
We are not pleased because another suffers an evil, 
bat because, seeing it is an evil, we see at the same 
time our own immunity from it. We might soften 
the picture a little, and perhaps make the principle 
even clearer by so doing. The shipwreck observed 
from the shore does not leave us wholly unmoved; 
we suffer, also, and if possibly would help. So, 
too, the spectacle of the erring world must sadden 
the philosopher even in the Acropolis of his wis- 
dom; he would, if it might be, descend from his 
meditation and teach. But those movements of 
sympathy are quickly inhibited by despair of suc- 
cess; impossibility of action is a great condition 
of the sublime. If we could count the stars, we 
should not weep before them. While we think we 
can change the drama of history, and of our own 
lives, we are not awed by our destiny. But when 
the evil is irreparable, when our life is lived, a 
strong spirit has the sublime resource of standing 
at bay and of surveying almost from the other 
world the vicissitudes of this. 



EXPRESSION 237 

The more intimate to himself the tragedy he is 
able to look back upon with calmness, the more 
sublime that calmness is, and the more divine the 
ecstasy in which he achieves it. For the more of 
the accidental vesture of life we are able to strip 
ourselves of, the more naked and simple is the 
surviving spirit; the more complete its superiority 
and unity, and, consequently, the more unqualified 
its joy. There remains little in us, then, but that 
intellectual essence, which several great philosophers 
have called eternal and identified with the Divinity. 

A single illustration may help to fix these prin- 
ciples in the mind. When Othello has discovered 
his fatal error, and is resolved to take his own 
life, he stops his groaning, and addresses the 
ambassadors of Venice thus: 

Speak of me as I am : nothing extenuate, 

Nor set down aught in malice : then, must you speak 

Of one that loved, not wisely, but too well ; 

Of one not easily jealous, but, being wrought, 

Perplexed in the extreme ; of one whose hand, 

Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away 

Richer than all his tribe ; of one whose subdued eyes, 

Albeit unused to the melting mood, 

Drop tears as fast as the Arabian trees 

Their medicinal gum. Set you down this : 

And say, besides, that in Aleppo once 

When a malignant and a turbaned Turk 

Beat a Venetian, and traduced the state, 

I took by the throat the circumcised dog, 

And smote him, thus. 

There is a kind of criticism that would see in 
all these allusions, figures of speech, and wander- 



238 THE SENSE OF BEAUTY 

ing reflections, an unnatural rendering of suicide. 
The man, we might be told, should have muttered 
a few broken phrases, and killed himself without 
this pomp of declamation, like the jealous hus- 
bands in the daily papers. But the conventions 
of the tragic stage are more favourable to psycho- 
logical truth than the conventions of real life. If 
we may trust the imagination (and in imagination 
lies, as we have seen, the test of propriety), this 
is what Othello would have felt. If he had not 
expressed it, his dumbness would have been due to 
external hindrances, not to the failure in his mind 
of just such complex and rhetorical thoughts as 
the poet has put into his mouth. The height of 
passion is naturally complex and rhetorical. Love 
makes us poets, and the approach of death should 
make us philosophers. When a man knows that 
his life is over, he can look back upon it from a 
universal standpoint. He has nothing more to 
live for, but if the energy of his mind remains 
unimpaired, he will still wish to live, and, being 
out off from his personal ambitions, he will impute 
to himself a kind of vicarious immortality by 
identifying himself with what is eternal. He 
speaks of himself as he is, or rather as he was. 
He sums himself up, and points to his achieve- 
ment. This I have been, says he, this I have 
done. 

This comprehensive and impartial view, this 
synthesis and objectification of experience, consti- 
tutes the liberation of the soul and the essence of 
sublimity. That the hero attains it at the end 



KXPRE88ION 389 

consoles us, as it consoles him, for his hideous 
misfortunes. Our pity and terror are indeed 
purged; we go away knowing that, however tangled 
the net may be in which we feel ourselves caught, 
there is liberation beyond, and an ultimate peace. 



§ 80. So natural is the relation be- **•* 
tween the vivid conception of great evils, 0/ tA#7*pii«- 
and that self-assertion of the soul which t/WI ofwiL 
gives the emotion of the sublime, that the sublime 
is often thought to depend upon the terror which 
these conceived evils inspire. To be sure, that 
terror would have to be inhibited and subdued, 
otherwise we should have a passion too acute to be 
incorporated in any object; the sublime would not 
appear as an aesthetic quality in things, but remain 
merely an emotional state in the subject. But this 
subdued and objectified terror is what is commonly 
regarded as the essence of the sublime, and so great 
an authority as Aristotle would seem to counte- 
nance some such definition. The usual cause of the 
sublime is here confused, however, with the sub- 
lime itself. The suggestion of terror makes us 
withdraw into ourselves : there with the superven- 
ing consciousness of safety or indifference comes a 
rebound, and we have that emotion of detachment 
and liberation in which the sublime really consists. 

Thoughts and actions are properly sublime, and 
visible things only by analogy and suggestion when 
they induce a certain moral emotion; whereas 
beauty belongs properly to sensible things, and 
can be predicated of moral facts only by a figure 



240 THE SENSE OF BEAUTY 

of rhetoric. What we objectify in beauty is a 
sensation. What we objectify in the sublime is an 
act. This act is necessarily pleasant, for if it 
were not the sublime would be a bad quality and 
one we should rather never encounter in the world. 
The glorious joy of self-assertion in the face of an 
uncontrollable world is indeed so deep and entire, 
that it furnishes just that transcendent element of 
worth for which we were looking when we tried to 
understand how the expression of pain could some- 
times please. It can please, not in itself, but 
because it is balanced and annulled by positive 
pleasures, especially by this final and victorious 
one of detachment. If the expression of evil 
seems necessary to the sublime, it is so only as a 
condition of this moral reaction. 

We are commonly too much engrossed in objects 
and too little centred in ourselves and our inalien- 
able will, to see the sublimity of a pleasing prospect. 
We are then enticed and flattered, and won over to 
a commerce with these external goods, and the con- 
summation of our happiness would lie in the per- 
fect comprehension and enjoyment of their nature. 
This is the offioe of art and of love; and its partial 
fulfilment is seen in every perception of beauty. 
But when we are checked in this sympathetic 
endeavour after unity and comprehension; when 
we come upon a great evil or an irreconcilable 
power, we are driven to seek our happiness by the 
shorter and heroic road; then we reoognize the 
hopeless foreignness of what lies before us, and 
stiffen ourselves against it. We thus for the first 



EXPRESSION 341 

time reach the sense of our possible separation 
from our world, and of our abstract stability; and 
with this comes the sublime. 

But although experience of evil is the common- 
est approach to this attitude of mind, and we com- 
monly become philosophers only after despairing 
of instinctive happiness, yet there is nothing 
impossible in the attainment of detachment by 
other channels. The immense is sublime as well 
as the terrible; and mere infinity of the object, 
like its hostile nature, can have the effect of mak- 
ing the mind recoil upon itself. Infinity, like 
hostility, removes us from things, and makes us 
conscious of our independence. The simultaneous 
view of many things, innumerable attractions felt 
together, produce equilibrium and indifference, as 
effectually as the exclusion of all. If we may call 
the liberation of the self by the consciousness of 
evil in the world, the Stoic sublime, we may assert 
that there is also an Epicurean sublime, which con- 
sists in liberation by equipoise. Any wide survey 
is sublime in that fashion. Each detail may be 
beautiful. We may even be ready with a passion- 
ate response to its appeal. We may think we covet 
every sort of pleasure, and lean to every kind of 
vigorous, impulsive life. But let an infinite pano- 
rama be suddenly unfolded; the will is instantly 
paralyzed, and the heart choked. It is impossible 
to desire everything at once, and when all is 
offered and approved, it is impossible to choose 
everything. In this suspense, the mind soars into 
a kind of heaven, benevolent but unmoved. 



242 THE SENSE OF BEAUTY 

This is the attitude of all minds to which breadth 
of interest or length of years has brought balance 
and dignity. The sacerdotal quality of old age 
comes from this same sympathy in disinterested- 
ness. Old men full of hurry and passion appear 
as fools, because we understand that their expe- 
rience has not left enough mark upon their brain 
to qualify with the memory of other goods any 
object that may be now presented. We cannot 
venerate any one in whom appreciation is not 
divorced from desire. And this elevation and 
detachment of the heart need not follow upon any 
great disappointment; it is finest and sweetest 
where it is the gradual fruit of many affections 
now merged and mellowed into a natural piety. 
Indeed, we are able to frame our idea of the Deity 
on no other model. 

When the pantheists try to conceive all the 
parts of nature as forming a single being, which 
shall contain them all and yet have absolute unity, 
they find themselves soon denying the existence 
of the world they are trying to deify; for nature, 
reduced to the unity it would assume in an om- 
niscient mind, is no longer nature, but some- 
thing simple and impossible, the exact opposite 
of the real world. Such an opposition would con- 
stitute the liberation of the divine mind from 
nature, and its existence as a self-conscious indi- 
vidual. The effort after comprehensiveness of 
view reduces things to unity, but this unity stands 
out in opposition to the manifold phenomena which 
it transcends, and rejects as unreal. 



EXPRESSION 343 

Now this destruction of nature, which the meta- 
physicians since Farmenides have so often repeated 
(nature nevertheless surviving still), is but a theo- 
retical counterpart and hypostasis of what happens 
in every man's conscience when the comprehen- 
siveness of his experience lifts him into thought, 
into abstraction. The sense of the sublime is 
essentially mystical: it is the transcending of dis- 
tinct perception in favour of a feeling of unity and 
volume. So in the moral sphere, we have the 
mutual cancelling of the passions in the breast 
that includes them all, and their final subsidence 
beneath the glance that comprehends them. This 
is the Epicurean approach to detachment and per- 
fection; it leads by systematic acceptance of in- 
stinct to the same goal which the stoic and the 
ascetic reach by systematic rejection of instinct. 
It is thus possible to be moved to that self -enfran- 
chisement which constitutes the sublime, even when 
the object contains no expression of evil. 

This conclusion supports that part of our defini- 
tion of beauty which declares that the values beauty 
contains are all positive; a definition which we 
should have had to change if we had found that 
the sublime depended upon the suggestion of evil 
for its effect. But the sublime is not the ugly, as 
some descriptions of it might lead us to suppose; 
it is the supremely, the intoxicatingly beautiful. 
It is the pleasure of contemplation reaching such 
an intensity that it begins to lose its objectivity, 
and to declare itself, what it always fundamentally 
was, an inward passion of the soul. For while in 



244 THE SENSE OF BEAUTY 

the beautiful we find the perfection of life by sink- 
ing into the object, in the sublime we find a purer 
and more inalienable perfection by defying the 
object altogether. The surprised enlargement of 
vision, the sudden escape from our ordinary inter- 
ests and the identification of ourselves with some- 
thing permanent and superhuman, something much 
more abstract and inalienable than our changing per- 
sonality, all this carries us away from the blurred 
objects before us, and raises us into a sort of ecstasy. 
In the trite examples of the sublime, where we 
speak of the vast mass, strength, and durability 
of objects, or of their sinister aspect, as if we were 
moved by them on account of our own danger, we 
seem to miss the point. For the suggestion of our 
own danger would produce a touch of fear; it 
would be a practical passion, or if it could by 
chance be objectified enough to become ssthetic, it 
would merely make the object hateful and repul- 
sive, like a mangled corpse. The object is sublime 
when we forget our danger, when we escape from 
ourselves altogether, and live as it were in the 
object itself, energizing in imitation of its move- 
ment, and saying, "Be thou me, impetuous one! " 
This passage into the object, to live its life, is 
indeed a characteristic of all perfect contempla- 
tion. But when in thus translating ourselves we 
rise and play a higher personage, feeling the exhila- 
ration of a life freer and wilder than our own, then 
the experience is one of sublimity. The emotion 
comes not from the situation we observe, but from 
the powers we conceive ; we fail to sympathize with 



EXPRESSION 245 

the straggling sailors because we sympathise too 
much with the wind and wares. And this mysti- 
cal cruelty can extend even to ourselves; we can 
so feel the fascination of the cosmic forces that 
engulf us as to take a fierce joy in the thought of 
our own destruction. We can identify ourselves 
with the abstractest essence of reality, and, raised 
to that height, despise the human accidents of our 
own nature. Lord, we say, though thou slay me, 
yet will I trust in thee. The sense of suffering 
disappears in the sense of life and the imagination 
overwhelms the understanding. 



S 81. Something analogous takes place ro« « 
in the other spheres where an Aesthetic value seems 
to arise out of suggestions of evil, in the comic, 
namely, and the grotesque. But here the trans- 
lation of our sympathies is partial, and we are 
carried away from ourselves only to become 
smaller. The larger humanity, which cannot be 
absorbed, remains ready to contradict the absurd- 
ity of our fiction. The excellence of comedy lies 
in the invitation to wander along some by-path of 
the fancy, among scenes not essentially impossible, 
but not to be actually enacted by us on account of 
the fixed circumstances of our lives. If the picture 
is agreeable, we allow ourselves to dream it true. 
We forget its relations; we forbid the eye to 
wander beyond the frame of the stage, or the 
conventions of the fiction. We indulge an illu- 
sion which deepens our sense of the essential 
pleasantness of things. 



246 THE SENSE OF BEAUTY 

So fary there is nothing in comedy that is not 
delightful, except^ perhaps, the moment when 
it is over. But fiction, like all error or ab- 
straction, is necessarily unstable; and the awaken- 
ing is not always reserved for the disheartening 
moment at the end. Everywhere, when we are 
dealing with pretension or mistake, we come 
upon sudden and vivid contradictions; changes of 
view, transformations of apperception which are 
extremely stimulating to the imagination. We 
have spoken of one of these: when the sudden 
dissolution of our common habits of thought lifts 
us into a mystical contemplation, filled with the 
sense of the sublime; when the transformation is 
back to common sense and reality, and away from 
some fiction, we have a very different emotion. We 
feel cheated, relieved, abashed, or amused, in pro- 
portion as our sympathy attaches more to the point 
of view surrendered or to that attained. 

The disintegration of mental forms and their 
redintegration is the life of the imagination. It 
is a spiritual process of birth and death, nutrition 
and generation. The strongest emotions accom- 
pany these changes, and vary infinitely with their 
variations. All the qualities of discourse, wit, 
eloquence, cogency, absurdity, are feelings inci- 
dental to this process, and involved in the juxta- 
positions, tensions, and resolutions of our ideas. 
Doubtless the last explanation of these things 
would be cerebral; but we are as yet confined to 
verbal descriptions and classifications of them, 
which are always more or less arbitrary. 



EXPRESSION 247 

The most conspicuous headings under which 
comio effects are gathered are perhaps incongru- 
ity and degradation. But dearly it cannot be the 
logical essence of incongruity or degradation that 
constitutes the comic; for then contradiction and 
deterioration would always amuse. Amusement 
is a much more directly physical thing. We may 
be amused without any idea at all, as when we are 
tickled, or laugh in sympathy with others by a 
contagious imitation of their gestures. We may 
be amused by the mere repetition of a thing at 
first not amusing. There must therefore be some 
nervous excitement on which the feeling of amuse- 
ment directly depends, although this excitement 
may most often coincide with a sudden transition 
to an incongruous or meaner image. Nor can we 
suppose that particular ideational excitement to be 
entirely dissimilar to all others ; wit is often hardly 
distinguishable from brilliancy, as humour from 
pathos. We must, therefore, be satisfied with say- 
ing vaguely that the process of ideation involves 
various feelings of movement and relation, — feel- 
ings capable of infinite gradation and complexity, 
and ranging from sublimity to tedium and from 
pathos to uncontrollable merriment. 

Certain crude and obvious cases of the comic 
seem to consist of little more than a shock of sur- 
prise: a pun is a sort of jack-in-the-box, popping 
from nowhere into our plodding thoughts. The 
liveliness of the interruption, and its futility, often 
please; duke est desipere in loco; and yet those who 
must endure the society of inveterate jokers know 



848 THE SENSE OF BEAUTY 

how intolerable this sort of scintillation can be- 
come. There is something inherently rulgar about 
it; perhaps because our train of thought cannot be 
very entertaining in itself when we are so glad to 
break in upon it with irrelevant nullities. The 
same undertone of disgust mingles with other amus- 
ing surprises, as when a dignified personage slips 
and falls, or some disguise is thrown off, or those 
things are mentioned and described which conven- 
tion ignores. The novelty and the freedom please, 
yet the shock often outlasts the pleasure, and we 
have cause to wish we had been stimulated by some- 
thing which did not involve this degradation. 80, 
also, the impossibility in plausibility which tickles 
the fancy in Irish bulls, and in wild exaggerations, 
leaves an uncomfortable impression, a certain after- 
taste of foolishness. 

The reason will be apparent if we stop to ana- 
lyze the situation. We have a prosaic background 
of common sense and e very-day reality; upon this 
background an unexpected idea suddenly impinges. 
But the thing is a futility. The comic accident 
falsifies the nature before us, starts a wrong anal- 
ogy in the mind, a suggestion that cannot be 
carried out. In a word, we are in the presenoe 
of an absurdity; and man, being a rational ani- 
mal, can like absurdity no better than he can 
like hunger or cold. A pinch of either may not 
be so bad, and he will endure it merrily enough if 
you repay him with abundance of warm victuals; 
so, too, he will play with all kinds of nonsense for 
the sake of laughter and good fellowship and the 



EXPRESSION 349 

tickling of his fancy with a sort of caricature of 
thought. But the qualm remains, and the pleasure 
is never perfect. The same exhilaration might 
have come without the falsification, just as repose 
follows more swiftly after pleasant than after pain- 
ful exertions. 

Fun is a good thing, but only when it spoils 
nothing better. The best place for absurdity is in 
the midst of what is already absurd — then we 
hare the play of fancy without the sense of inepti- 
tude. Things amuse us in the mouth of a fool that 
would not amuse us in that of a gentleman; a fact 
which shows how little incongruity and degrada- 
tion have to do with our pleasure in the comic In 
fact, there is a kind of congruity and method even 
in fooling. The incongruous and the degraded dis- 
please us even there, as by their nature they must 
at all times. The shock which they bring may 
sometimes be the occasion of a subsequent pleas- 
ure, by attracting our attention, or by stimulating 
passions, such as scorn, or cruelty, or self-satis- 
faction (for there is a good deal of malice in our 
love of fun); but the incongruity and degradation, 
as such, alwayB remain unpleasant. The pleasure 
oomes from the inward rationality and movement 
of the fiction, not from its inconsistency with 
anything else. There are a great many topsy- 
turvy worlds possible to our fancy, into which 
we like to drop at times. We enjoy the stim- 
ulation and the shaking up of our wits. It is 
like getting into a new posture, or hearing a new 
song. 



200 THE SENSE OF BEAUTY 

Nonsense is good only because common sense is 
so limited. For reason, after all, is one conven- 
tion picked ont of a thousand. We love expansion! 
not disorder, and when we attain freedom without 
incongruity we have a much greater and a much 
purer delight. The excellence of wit can dispense 
with absurdity. For on the same prosaio back- 
ground of common sense, a novelty might have 
appeared that was not absurd, that stimulated the 
attention quite as much as the ridiculous, without 
so baffling the intelligence. This purer and more 
thoroughly delightful amusement comes from what 
we call wit. 

wh. f 02. Wit also depends upon trans- 

formation and substitution of ideas. It has been 
said to consist in quick association by similarity. 
The substitution must here be valid, however, and 
the similarity real, though unforeseen. Unex- 
pected justness makes wit, as sudden incongruity 
makes pleasant foolishness. It is characteristic of 
wit to penetrate into hidden depths of things, to 
pick out there some telling circumstance or relation, 
by noting which the whole object appears in a new 
and clearer light. Wit often seems malicious be- 
cause analysis in discovering common traits and 
universal principles assimilates things at the poles 
of beings it can apply to cookery the formulas of 
theology, and find in the human heart a case of the 
fulcrum and lever. We commonly keep the depart- 
ments of experience distinct; we think that differ- 
ent principles hold in each and that the dignity of 



EXPRESSION 261 

spirit is inconsistent with the explanation of it 
by physical analogy, and the meanness of matter 
unworthy of being an illustration of moral truths. 
Love must not be classed under physical cravings, 
nor faith under hypnotization. When, therefore, 
an original mind overleaps these boundaries, and 
recasts its categories, mixing up our old classifica- 
tions, we feel that the values of things are also 
confused. But these depended upon a deeper rela- 
tion, upon their response to human needs and aspi- 
rations. All that can be changed by the exercise 
of intelligence is our sense of the unity and homo- 
geneity of the world. We may come to hold an 
object of thought in less isolated respect, and an- 
other in less hasty derision; but the pleasures we 
derive from all, or our total happiness and 
wonder, will hardly be diminished. For this 
reason the malicious or destructive character of 
intelligence must not be regarded as fundamen- 
tal* Wit belittles one thing and dignifies another,- 
and its comparisons are as often flattering as iron- 
ical. 

The same process of mind that we observed in 
wit gives rise to those effects we call charming, 
brilliant, or inspired. When Shakespeare says, 

Come and kiss me, sweet and twenty, 
Youth's a stuff will not endure, 

the fancy of the phrase consists in a happy substi- 
tution, a merry way of saying something both true 
and tender. And where could we find a more ex- 
quisite charm? So, to take a weightier example, 



382 THE 8SN8E OF BEAUTY 

when 8t Augustine ifl made to gay that pagan virtues 
were splendid vices, we have — at least if we catch 
the full meaning — a pungent assimilation of con- 
trary things, by force of a powerful principle; a 
triumph of theory, the boldness of which can only 
be matched by its consistency. In fact, a phrase 
could not be more brilliant, or better condense one 
theology and two civilizations. The Latin mind is 
particularly capable of this sort of excellence. 
Tacitus alone could furnish a hundred examples. 
It goes with the power of satirical and bitter elo- 
quence, a sort of scornful rudeness of intelligence, 
that makes for the core of a passion or of a charac- 
ter, and affixes to it a more or less scandalous label. 
For in our analytical zeal it is often possible to 
condense and abstract too much. Reality is more 
fluid and elusive than reason, and has, as it were, 
more dimensions than are known even to the latest 
geometry. Hence the understanding, when not 
suffused with some glow of sympathetic emotion or 
some touch of mysticism, gives but a dry, crude 
image of the world. The quality of wit inspires 
more admiration than confidence. It is a merit 
we should miss little in any one we love. 
. The same principle, however, can have more sen- 
timental embodiments. When our substitutions are 
brought on by the excitement of generous emotion, 
we call wit inspiration. There is the same finding 
of new analogies, and likening of disparate things; 
there is the same transformation of our appercep- 
tion. But the brilliancy is here not only penetrat- 
ing, but also exalting. For instance: 



EXPRESSION 863 

Peace, peaoe, he is not dead, he doth not sleep, 
He hath awakened from the dream of life : 

'Tie we that wrapped in stormy visions keep 
With phantoms an unprofitable strife. 

There is here paradox, and paradox justified by 
reflection. The poet analyzes, and analyzes with- 
out reserve. The dream, the storm, the phantoms, 
and the unprofitableness could easily make a satiri- 
cal picture. But the mood is transmuted ; the mind 
takes an upward flight, with a sense of liberation 
from the convention it dissolves, and of freer motion 
in the vagueness beyond. The disintegration of our 
ideal here leads to mysticism, and because of this 
effort towards transcendence, the brilliancy becomes 
sublime. 

§83. A different mood can give a dif- ***»• 
ferent direction to the same processes. The sym- 
pathy by which we reproduce the feeling of another, 
is always very much opposed to the aesthetic atti- 
tude to which the whole world is merely a stimu- 
lus to our sensibility. In the tragic, we have seen 
how the sympathetic feeling, by which suffering 
is appreciated and shared, has to be overlaid by 
many incidental aesthetic pleasures, if the result- 
ing effect is to be on the whole good. We have 
also seen how the only way in which the ridiculous 
can be kept within the sphere of the aesthetically 
good is abstracting it from its relations, and treat- 
ing it as an independent and curious stimulus; we 
should stop laughing and begin to be annoyed if 
we tried to make sense out of our absurdity. The 



364 THE 8BNSB OF BEAUTY 

less sympathy we hare with men the more ex* 
quisite is our enjoyment of their folly: satiri- 
cal delight is closely akin to cruelty. Defect and 
mishap stimulate our fancy, as blood and tortures 
excite in us the passions of the beast of prey. The 
more this inhuman attitude yields to sympathy 
and reason, the less are folly and error capable of 
amusing us. It would therefore seem impossible 
that we should be pleased by the foibles or absurd- 
ities of those we love. And in fact we never 
enjoy seeing our own persons in a satirical light, 
or any one else for whom we really feel affection. 
Even in farces, the hero and heroine are seldom 
made ridiculous, because that would jar upon the 
sympathy with which we are expected to regard 
them. Nevertheless, the essence of what we call 
humour is that amusing weaknesses should be com- 
bined with an amicable humanity. Whether it be 
in the way of ingenuity, or oddity, or drollery, the 
humorous person must have an absurd side, or be 
placed in an absurd situation. Yet this comic 
aspect, at which we ought to wince, seems to en- 
dear the character all the more. This is a parallel 
case to that of tragedy, where the depth of the woe 
we sympathize with seems to add to our satisfac- 
tion. And the explanation of the paradox is the 
same. We do not enjoy the expression of evil, but 
only the pleasant excitements that come with it; 
namely, the physical stimulus and the expression 
of good. In tragedy, the misfortunes help to give 
the impression of truth, and to bring out the noble 
qualities of the hero, but are in themselves depr 



EXPRESSION 255 

ing, so much so that over-sensitive people cannot 
enjoy the beauty of the representation. So also in 
humour, the painful suggestions are felt as such, 
and need to be overbalanced by agreeable elements. 
These come from both directions, from the aesthetic 
and the sympathetic reaction. On the one hand 
there is the sensuous and merely perceptive stimu- 
lation, the novelty, the movement, the vivacity of 
the spectacle. On the other hand, there is the 
luxury of imaginative sympathy, the mental as- 
similation of another congenial experience, the 
expansion into another life. 

The juxtaposition of these two pleasures pro- 
duces just that tension and complication in which 
the humorous consists. We are satirical, and we 
are friendly at the same time. The consciousness 
of the friendship gives a regretful and tender touch 
to the satire, and the sting of the satire makes the 
friendship a trifle humble and sad. Don Quixote 
is mad; he is old, useless, and ridiculous, but he 
is the soul of honour, and in all his laughable 
adventures we follow him like the ghost of our 
better selves. We enjoy his discomfitures too 
much to wish he had been a perfect Amadis; and 
we have besides a shrewd suspicion that he is the 
only kind of Amadis there can ever be in this 
world. At the same time it does us good to see 
the courage of his idealism, the ingenuity of his 
wit, and the simplicity of his goodness. But how 
shall we reconcile our sympathy with his dream 
and our perception of its absurdity? The situa- 
tion is contradictory. We are drawn to some dif- 



206 THE ffiRSB OF HRAUTT 

f erent point of view, from which the comedy may 
no longer seem so amusing. As humour becomes 
deep and really different from satire, it changes 
into pathos, and passes out of the sphere of the 
comic altogether. The mischances that were to 
amuse us as scoffers now grieve us as men, and the 
Talue of the representation depends on the touches 
of beauty and seriousness with which it is adorned. 

*t $rou*qin. i 84, Something analogous to humour 
can appear in plastic forms, when we call it the 
grotesque. This is an interesting effect produced 
by such a transformation of an ideal type as exag- 
gerates one of its elements or combines it with 
other types. The real excellence of this, like 
that of all fiotion, consists in re-creation; in the 
formation of a thing which nature has not, but 
might conceivably have offered. We call these 
inventions comic and grotesque when we are con- 
sidering their divergence from the natural rather 
*han their inward possibility. But the latter con- 
stitutes their real charm; and the more we study 
and develope them, the better we understand it. 
The incongruity with the conventional type then 
disappears, and what was impossible and ridiculous 
at first takes its place among recognized ideals. 
The centaur and the satyr are no longer grotesque; 
the type is accepted. And the grotesqueness of 
an individual has essentially the same nature. If 
we like the inward harmony, the characteristic 
balance of his features, we are able to disengage 
this individual from the class into which we were 



KXFREB8I0H 307 

trying to foroe him; we can forget the expecta- 
tion which he was going to disappoint. The ugli- 
ness then disappears, and only the reassertion of 
the old habit and demand can make ns regard him 
as in any way extravagant. 

What appears as grotesque may be intrinsically 
inferior or superior to the normal. That is a 
question of its abstract material and form. But 
until the new object impresses its form on our 
imagination, so that we can grasp its unity and 
proportion, it appears to us as a jumble and distor- 
tion of other forms. If this confusion is absolute, 
the object is simply null; it does not exist aestheti- 
cally, except by virtue of materials. But if the 
confusion is not absolute, and we have an ink- 
ling of the unity and character in the midst of the 
strangeness of the form, then we have the gro- 
tesque. It is the half-formed, the perplexed, and 
the suggestively monstrous. 

The analogy to the comic is very close, as we 
can readily conceive that it should be. In the 
oomic we have this same juxtaposition of a new 
and an old idea, and if the new is not futile and 
really inconceivable, it may in time establish itself 
\n the mind, and cease to be ludicrous. Good wit 
is novel truth, as the good grotesque is novel 
beauty. But there are natural conditions of organ- 
ization, and we must not mistake every mutilation 
for the creation of a new form. The tendency of 
nature to establish well-marked species of animals 
shows what various combinations are most stable 
in the face of physical foroes, and there is a fitness 
s 



258 THE SENSE OF BEAUTY 

also for survival in the mind, which is determined 
by the relation of any form to our fixed method of 
perception. New things are therefore generally bad 
because, as has been well said, they are incapa- 
ble of becoming old. A thousand originalities are 
produced by defect of faculty, for one that is pro- 
duced by genius. For in the pursuit of beauty, as 
in that of truth, an infinite number of paths lead 
to failure, and only one to success. 

TKpouiMitir § 66. If these observations have any 
ftcth*. accuracy, they confirm this important 

truth, — that no aesthetic value is really 
founded on the experience or the suggestion of 
evil. This conclusion will doubtless seem the 
more interesting if we think of its possible exten- 
sion to the field of ethics and of the implied vindi- 
cation of the ideal of moral perfection as something 
essentially definable and attainable. But without 
insisting on an analogy to ethios, which might be 
misleading, we may hasten to state the principle 
which emerges from our analysis of expression. 
Expressiveness may be found in any one thing 
that suggests another, or draws from association 
with that other any of its emotional colouring. 
There may, therefore, of course, be an expressive- 
ness of evil; but this expressiveness will not have 
any aesthetic value. The description or sugges- 
tion of suffering may have a worth as soience or 
discipline, but can never in itself enhance any 
beauty. Tragedy and comedy please in spite of 
this expressiveness and not by virtue of it; and 



EXPRESSION 389 

except for the pleasures they give, they hare no 
place among the fine arts. Nor have they, in such 
a case, any place in human life at all; unless they 
are instruments of some practical purpose and serve 
to preach a moral, or achieve a bad notoriety. 
For ugly things can attract attention, although 
they cannot keep it; and the scandal of a new hor- 
ror may secure a certain vulgar admiration which 
follows whatever is momentarily conspicuous, and 
which is attained even by crime. Such admiration, 
however, has nothing sBsthetic about it, and is only 
made possible by the bluntness of our sense of 
beauty. 

The effect of the pathetic and comic is therefore 
never pure; since the expression of some evil is 
mixed up with those elements by which the whole 
appeals to us. These elements we have seen to be 
the truth of the presentation, which involves the 
pleasures of recognition and comprehension, the 
beauty of the medium, and the concomitant expres- 
sion of things intrinsically good. To these sources 
all the aesthetic value of comic and tragic is due; 
and the sympathetic emotion which arises from 
the spectacle of evil must never be allowed to 
overpower these pleasures of contemplation, else 
the entire object becomes distasteful and loses 
its excuse for being. Too exclusive a relish for 
the comic and pathetic is accordingly a sign of 
bad taste and of comparative insensibility to 
beauty. 

This situation has generally been appreciated in 
the practice of the arts, where effect is perpetually 



900 THE SENSE OF BEAUTY 

studied; bat the greatest care has not always suc- 
ceeded in avoiding the dangers of the pathetio, and 
history is fall of failures due to bombast* carica- 
ture, and unmitigated horror. In all these the 
effort to be expressive has transgressed the condi- 
tions of pleasing effect. For the creative and 
imitative impulse is indiscriminate. It does not 
consider the eventual beauty of the effect, but only 
the blind instinct of self-expression. Hence an 
untrained and not naturally sensitive mind cannot 
distinguish or produce anything good. This criti- 
cal incapacity has always been a cause of failure 
and a just ground for ridicule; but it remained for 
some thinkers of our time — a time of little art 
and much undisciplined production — to erect this 
abuse into a principle and declare that the essence 
of beauty is to express the artist and not to delight 
the world. But the conditions of effect, and the 
possibility of pleasing, are the only criterion of 
what is capable and worthy of expression. Art 
exists and has value by its adaptation to these 
universal conditions of beauty. 

Nothing but the good of life enters into the 
texture of the beautiful. What charms us in the 
comic, what stirs us in the sublime and touches 
us in the pathetic, is a glimpse of some good; 
imperfection has value only as an incipient per- 
fection. Could the labours and sufferings of life be 
reduced, and a better harmony between man and 
nature be established, nothing would be lost to the 
arts; for the pure and ultimate value of the comic 
is discovery 9 of the pathetic, love, of the sublime, 



EXPRESSION 261 

exaltation; and these would still subsist. Indeed, 
they would all be increased; and it has ever been, 
accordingly, in the happiest and most prosperous 
moments of humanity, when the mind and the 
world were knit into a brief embrace, that natural 
beauty has been best perceived, and art has won its 
triumphs. But it sometimes happens, in moments 
less propitious, that the soul is subdued to what it 
works in, and loses its power of idealization and 
hope. By a pathetic and superstitious self-depre- 
ciation, we then punish ourselves for the imper- 
fection of nature. Awed by the magnitude of a 
reality that we can no longer conceive as free from 
evil, we try to assert that its evil also is a good; 
and we poison the very essence of the good to make 
its extension universal. We confuse the causal 
connexion of those things in nature which we call 
good or evil by an adventitious denomination with 
the logical opposition between good and evil them- 
selves; because one generation makes room for 
another, we say death is necessary to life; and 
because the causes of sorrow and joy are so min- 
gled in this world, we cannot conceive how, in a 
better world, they might be disentangled. 

This incapacity of the imagination to reconstruct 
the conditions of life and build the frame of things 
nearer to the heart's desire is dangerous to a steady 
loyalty to what is noble and fine. We surrender 
ourselves to a kind of miscellaneous appreciation, 
without standard or goal; and calling every vexa- 
tious apparition by the name of beauty, we become 
incapable of discriminating its excellence or feel' 



262 THE SENSE OF BEAUTY 

ing its value. We need to clarify our ideals, and 
enliven our vision of perfection. No atheism is so 
terrible as the absence of an ultimate ideal, nor 
could any failure of power be more contrary to 
human nature than the failure of moral imagina- 
tion, or more incompatible with healthy life. For 
we have faculties, and habits, and impulses. These 
are the basis of our demands. And these demands, 
although variable, constitute an ever-present in- 
trinsic standard of value by which we feel and 
judge. The ideal is immanent in them; for the 
ideal means that environment in which our facul- 
ties would find their freest employment, and their 
most congenial world. Perfection would be noth- 
ing but life under those conditions. Accordingly 
our consciousness of the ideal becomes distinct in 
proportion as we advance in virtue and in propor- 
tion to the vigour and definiteness with which our 
faculties work. When the vital harmony is com- 
plete, when the act is pure, faith in perfection 
passes into vision. That man is unhappy indeed, 
who in all his life has had no glimpse of perfec- 
tion, who in the ecstasy of love, or in the delight 
of contemplation, has never been able to say: It is 
attained. Such moments of inspiration are the 
source of the arts, which have no higher function 
than to renew them. 

A work of art is indeed a monument to such a 
moment, the memorial to such a vision; and its 
charm varies with its power of recalling us from 
the distractions of common life to the joy of a more 
natural and perfect activity. 



EXFHJB5SICOT IBS 

§ 66. The perfection thus revealed is nitwit* 
relative to our nature and faculties; if * * a/ ' 
it were not, it could have no value for us. It is 
revealed to us in brief moments, but it is not for 
that reason an unstable or fantastic thing. Human 
attention inevitably flickers; we survey things in 
succession, and our acts of synthesis and our reali- 
zation of fact are only occasional. This is the 
tenure of all our possessions; we are not unin- 
terruptedly conscious of ourselves, our physical 
environment, our ruling passions, or our deepest 
conviction. What wonder, then, that we are not 
constantly conscious of that perfection which is 
the implicit ideal of all our preferences and de- 
sires? We view it only in parts, as passion or 
perception successively directs our attention to its 
various elements. Some of us never try to con- 
ceive it in its totality. Yet our whole life is an 
act of worship to this unknown divinity; every 
heartfelt prayer is offered before one or another of 
its images. 

This ideal of perfection varies, indeed, but only 
with the variations of our nature of which it is the 
counterpart and entelechy. There is perhaps no 
more frivolous notion than that to which Schopen- 
hauer has given a new currency, that a good, once 
attained, loses all its value. The instability of 
our attention, the need of rest and repair in our 
organs, makes a round of objects necessary to our 
minds; but we turn from a beautiful thing, as 
from a truth or a friend, only to return incessantly, 
and with increasing appreciation. Nor do we lose 



264 THE UNOI OP MAUTY 

all the benefit of our achievements in the interval* 
between our vivid realizations of what we have 
gained. The tone of the mind is permanently 
raised; and we live with that general sense of 
steadfastness and resource which is perhaps the 
kernel of happiness. Knowledge, affection, relig- 
ion, and beauty are not less constant influences 
in a man's life because his consciousness of them 
is intermittent. Even when absent, they fill the 
chambers of the mind with a kind of fragrance. 
They have a continual efficacy! as well as a peren- 
nial worth. 

There are, indeed, other objects of desire that if 
attained leave nothing but restlessness and dissat- 
isfaction behind them. These are the objects pur- 
sued by fools. That such objects ever attract us is 
a proof of the disorganization of our nature, which 
drives us in contrary directions and is at war with 
itself. If we had attained anything like steadiness 
of thought or fixity of character, if we knew our- 
selves, we should know also our inalienable satis- 
factions. To say that all goods become worthless 
in possession is either a piece of superficial satire 
that intentionally denies the normal in order to 
make the abnormal seem more shocking, or else it 
is a confession of frivolity, a confession that, as 
an idiot never learns to distinguish reality amid 
the phantasms of his brain, so we have never 
learned to distinguish true goods amid our extrava- 
gances of whim and passion. That true goods exist 
is nevertheless a fact of moral experience. "A 
thing of beauty is a joy for ever "; a great affection, 



EXPRESSION 966 

a clear thought, a profound and well-tried faith, 
are eternal possessions. And this is not merely a 
fact, to be asserted upon the authority of those 
who know it by experience. It is a psychological 
necessity. While we retain the same senses, we 
must get the same impressions from the same 
objects; while we keep our instincts and passions, 
we must pursue the same goods; while we have 
the same powers of imagination, we must experi- 
ence the same delight in their exercise. Age 
brings about, of course, variation in all these par- 
ticulars, and the susceptibility of two individuals 
is never exactly similar. But the eventual decay 
of our personal energies does not destroy the 
natural value of objects, so long as the same will 
embodies itself in other minds, and human nature 
subsists in the world. The sun is not now unreal 
because each one of us in succession, and all of us 
in the end, must close our eyes upon it; and yet 
the sun exists for us only because we perceive it. 
The ideal has the same conditions of being, but 
has this advantage over the sun, that we cannot 
know if its light is ever destined to fail us. 

There is then a broad foundation of identity in 
our nature, by virtue of which we live in a common 
world, and have an art and a religion in common. 
That the ideal should be constant within these 
limits is as inevitable as that it should vary be- 
yond them. And so long as we exist and recognize 
ourselves individually as persons or collectively as 
human, we must recognize also our immanent ideal, 
the realization of which would constitute perfection 



266 THE SENSE OF BEAUTY 

for us. That ideal cannot be destroyed except in 
proportion as we ourselves perish. An absolute 
perfection, independent of human nature and its 
variations, may interest the metaphysician; but the 
artist and the man will be satisfied with a perfec- 
tion that is inseparable from the consciousness of 
mankind, since it is at once the natural vision of 
the imagination, and the rational goal of the will. 



§ 67. We have now studied the sense 
of beauty in what seem to be its fundamental mani- 
festations, and in some of the more striking compli- 
cations which it undergoes. In surveying po broad 
a field we stand in need of some classification and 
subdivision; and we have chosen the familiar one 
of matter, form, and expression, as least likely to 
lead us into needless artificiality. But artificiality 
there must always be in the discursive description 
of anything given in consciousness. Psychology 
attempts what is perhaps impossible, namely, the 
anatomy of life. Mind is a fluid; the lights and 
shadows that flicker through it have no real boun- 
daries, and no possibility of permanence. Our 
whole classification of mental facts is borrowed 
from the physical conditions or expressions of 
them. The very senses are distinguished because 
of the readiness with which we can isolate their 
outer organs. Ideas can be identified only by 
identifying their objects. Feelings are reoognized 
by their outer expression, and when we try to recall 
an emotion, we must do so by recalling the circum- 
stances in which it oocurred. 



EXPRESSION 267 

In distinguishing, then, in our sense of beauty, 
an appreciation of sensible material, one of abstract 
form, and another of associated values, we have 
been merely following the established method of 
psychology, the only one by which it is possible to 
analyze the mind. We have distinguished the ele- 
ments of the object, and treated the feeling as if it 
were composed of corresponding parts. The worlds 
of nature and fancy, which are the object of aes- 
thetic feeling, can be divided into parts in space 
and time. We can then distinguish the material 
of things from the various forms it may succes- 
sively assume; we can distinguish, also, the earlier 
and the later impressions made by the same object; 
and we can ascertain the coexistence of one impres- 
sion with* another, or with the memory of others. 
But aesthetic, feeling itself has no parts, and this 
physiology of its causes is not a description of its 
proper nature. 

Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable: 
what it is or what it means can never be said. By 
appealing to experiment and memory we can show 
that this feeling varies as certain things vary in 
the objective conditions; that it varies with the 
frequency, for instance, with which a form has 
been presented, or with the associates which that 
form has had in the past. This will justify a 
description of the feeling as composed of the vari- 
ous contributions of these objects. But the feeling 
itself knows nothing of composition nor contribu- 
tions. It is an affection of the soul, a conscious- n 
ness of joy and security, a pang, a dream, a pure 



\ 



268 THE SENSE OF BEAUTY 

pleasure. It suffuses an object without telling 
why; nor has it any need to ask the question. It 
justifies itself and the vision it gilds; nor is there 
any meaning in seeking for a cause of it, in this 
inward sense. Beauty exists for the same reason 
that the object which is beautiful exists, or the 
world in which that object lies, or we that look 
upon both. It is an experience: there is nothing 
more to say about it. Indeed, if we look at things 
teleologically, and as they ultimately justify them- 
selves to the heart, beauty is of all things what 
least calls for explanation. For matter and space 
and time and principles of reason and of evolution, 
all are ultimately brute, unaccountable data. We 
may describe what actually is, but it might have 
been otherwise, and the mystery of its being is as 
baffling and dark as ever. 

But we, — the minds that ask all questions and 
judge of the validity of all answers, — we are not 
ourselves independent of this world in which we 
live. We sprang from it, and our relations in it 
determine all our instincts and satisfactions. This 
final questioning and sense of mystery is an unsat- 
isfied craving which nature has her way of stilling. 
Now we only ask for reasons when we are sur- 
prised. If we had no expectations we should have 
no surprises. And what gives us expectation is 
the spontaneous direction of our thought, deter- 
mined by the structure of our brain and the effects 
of our experience. If our spontaneous thoughts 
came to run in harmony with the course of nature, 
if our expectations were then oontinually fulfilled, 



EXPRESSION 289 

the sense of mystery would vanish. We should be 
incapable of asking why the world existed or had 
such a nature, just as we are now little inclined to 
ask why anything is right, but mightily disinclined 
to give up asking why anything is wrong. 

This satisfaction of our reason, due to the har- 
mony between our nature and our experience, is 
partially realized already. The sense of beauty is 
its realization. When our senses and imagination 
find what they crave, when the world so shapes 
itself or so moulds the mind that the correspond- 
ence between them is perfect, then perception is 
pleasure, and existence needs no apology. The 
duality which is the condition of conflict disap- 
pears. There is no inward standard different from 
the outward fact with which that outward fact may 
be compared. A unification of \this kind is the 
goal of our intelligence and of our affection, quite 
as much as of our aesthetic sense; but we have in 
those departments fewer examples of success. In 
the heat of speculation or of love there may come 
moments of equal perfection, but they are very 
unstable. The reason and the heart remain deeply 
unsatisfied. But the eye finds in nature, and in 
some supreme achievements of art, constant and 
fuller satisfaction. For the eye is quick, and 
seems to have been more docile to the education of 
life than the heart or the reason of man, and able 
sooner to adapt itself to the reality. Beauty there- 
fore seems to be the clearest manifestation of per- 
fection, and the best evidence of its possibility. 
If perfection is, as it should be, the ultimate juiti- 



270 THB SSN8I OF BEAUTY 

fication of being, we may understand the ground 
of the moral dignity of beauty. Beauty is a 
pledge of the possible conformity between the soul 
and nature, and consequently a ground of faith in 
the supremacy of the good. 



INDEX 



Achilles, 179, 187. 
Esthetic feeling, its impor- 
tance, 1. 
speculation, causes of its 

neglect, 2. 
theory, its uses, 6, 7. 
Esthetics, Use of the word, 15. 
Angels, 65, 182. 
Apperception, 96 et seq. 
Arabic inscriptions as orna- 
ment, 195. 
Architecture, Effects of Gothic, 
165,166. 
governed by use, 161, 162. 
Aristotelian forms, 156. 
Aristotle, 174, 175, 288. 
Associative process, 198 et teq. 
Augustine, Saint, quoted, 252. 

Beauty a value, 14 et 9eq. 
as felt is indescribable, 267, 

268. 
a justification of things, 268, 

269. 
denned, 49 et seq. 
verbal definitions quoted, 14. 
Beethoven, 43. 
Breathing related to the sense 

of beauty, 56. 
Burke, 124, note. 
Byron, quoted, 136. 
Bysantine architecture, 106, 
109. 



271 



,174. 
Centaurs, 188, 256. 
Character as an aesthetic form, 

176 et $eq. 
Characters, Ideal, 180 1 —q. 
Charles V.'s palace at the Al- 

hambra, 44. 
Christ, the various ideas of his 

nature, 189. 
Circle, its sssthetie quality, 89. 
Classicism, French and Eng- 

lish,109. 
Colonnades, 108. 
Colour, 72 et teq. 

its analogy to other sensa- 
tions, 74, 75. 
possibility of an abstract art 

of colour, 75. 
Comic, The, 245 et teg. 
Conscience, its representative 

character, 33, 84. 
Cost as an element of effect, 

211 et seq. 
Couplet, The, 108. 
Criticism, Use of the word, 15. 

Definite and indefinite, mean- 
ing of the terms, 138, 
note. 

Degradation not what pleases 
in the comic, 247 el $eq. 

Democracy, aesthetics of it, 109 
tseq. 



272 



INDEX 



Desotitet, 16, IBS. 

Disinterestedness not the differ- 
entia of smthttie pleas- 
ure, 87 et seg. 

Don Quixote, 179, 966. 

Economy and fitness, 214 et eeq. 

Emerson, 144. 

Epicurean aesthetics, 10, 11. 

sublime, The, 241, 248. 
Escurisi, The, 96, 210. 
Ethos, 174, 176. 

Eril, life without it esthetic, 
29,80. 

in the seoond term of ex- 
prossion, 221 el eeq. 

eonYcntional oat of the 



an occasion of the sublime, 

285 et eeq. 
excluded from the beautiful, 
280,261. 
Evolution, its possible tendency 
to eliminate imagination, 
26. 
ExclusiTeness a sign of sst- 

thetic rigour, 44. 
Experience superior to theory 

in esthetics, 11, 12. 
Expression defined, 192 et eeq. 
of feeling in another, 202, 

208. 
of practical Talues, 206 et 
eeq. 
Expressiveness, Use of the 
word, 197. 

Fechner, 97. 

Form, There la a beauty of, 82 

eteeq. 
the unity of a manifold, 96 

eteeq. 
Functions of the mind may all 

contribute to the sense 

of beauty, 68 c t eeq. 



Geometrical figures, 88 *t —q . 

God, the idea of him in tradi- 
tion and in metaphysics, 
188,189. 

Gods, development of their 
ideal characters, 186 et 
eeq. 

Goethe, 9, 170, 179. 

Grammar, its analogy to i 
physios, 109. 

Gretehen, 179. 

Grotesque, The, 256 et eeq. 



179. 

Happiness and esthetic inter- 
est, 65, 66. 

Health a condition of esthetic 
life, 64. 

Hedonism opposed by the moral 
sense, 23, 24. 

History an imaginative thing, 
141,142. 

Home as a social and at an 
sMthetie idea, 64. 

Homer, 171. 

his esthetic quality, 206, 

206. 
his epithets, 179. 

Horace, quoted, 172. 

Humour, 268 et eeq. 

Ideals art modified average*, 
121 et eeq. 
Immanent in human nature, 

262. 
stable, 263 et eeq. 
Imagination has a nniTtnal 
creative function, 190, 
191. 
and sense alternately active, 
65,66. 
Impression distinguished from 

expression, 84, 86. 
Impressionism in painting, 184, 
136. 



27S 



Incongruity not what pleases 
in the comic, 247 et seq. 

Indeterminate organization, 131 
et seq. 

Infinite beauty, the idea im- 
possible, 148 e< so?. 

Inspiration, 252, 263. 

K«Xo*d7o*f«, 31. 

Kant, 106. 

Keats, quoted, 67, 105, 181, 254. 

King Lear, 229. 

Kipling, R., quoted, 68. 

Landscape, 183 et seq. 

with figures, 135, 186. 
Liberation of self, 233 et seq. 
Lore, influence of the passion, 

56 et seq. 
Lowell, J. R., quoted, 148. 
Lower senses, 65 et seq. 
Lucretius, quoted, 172. 

on the sublime, 236. 

Haps, 209, 210. 

Material beauty most easily ap- 
preciated, 78 et seq. 
its effect the fundamental 

one, 78. 
Materials of beauty surveyed, 

76 et $eq. 
Methods in aesthetics, 5. 
Michael Angelo, 182. 
Miser's fallacy, its parallel in 

morals and sssthetics, 

31,32. 
Modern languages inferior to 

the ancient, 173, 174. 
Moliere, 174 ; quoted, 20. 
Monarchy, its imaginative 

value, 34, 35. 
Moral and esthetic values, 23 

etseq. 
the authority of morals over 

aesthetics, 218 et see/. 

T 



Morality and utility Jealous of 

art, 216, 217. 
Multiplicity in . uniformity, 97 

etseq. 
its defects, 106 «**?. 
Musset, Alfred de, quoted, 170, 

226. 
Mysticism in sBStheties, 126 

state;. 

Naturalism, the ground of its 

value, 21. 
Nature, its organization the 

source of apperceptive 

forms, 152 et seq. 
the love of it among the 

ancients, 137, 138. 
New York, the plan of the 

streets, 95. 
Nouns, idea of a language 

without them, 171. 

Ob jeettfieation the differentia 
of aesthetic pleasure, 44 
etseq. 

Ornament and form, 63 et seq. 

Othello, 237. 

Ovid, quoted, 149. 

Pantheism, its contradictions, 

242,243. 
Perception, the psychological 

theory of it, 45 et seq. 
Perfection, illusion of infinite, 

146 et seq. 
possibility of finite, 258 et 

seq. 
Physical pleasure distinguished 

from aesthetic, 35 et seq. 
Physiology of the perception 

of form, 85 et seq. 
Picturesqueness contrasted 

with symmetry, 92. 
Platonic ideas useless in ex* 

plaining types, 117, 118. 



274 



INDEX 



Platonic intuitions, their nature 
andv*lue,8etMo;. 

Platonists, 159. 

Plot, The, 174 et seq. 

Preference ultimately irra- 
tional, 18 et seq. 
necessary to value, 17, 18. 

Principles consecrated aesthet- 
ically, 31 et seq. 

Parity, The SMthetic principle 
of, 70 et seq. 

Rationality, the source of its 

value, 19, 20. 
Religions characters, their 
truth, 188. 
imagination, 185 et seq. 
Rhyme, 173, 174. 
Romanticism, 150. 

Schopenhauer, 263. 
criticised, 37, note, 
on music, 69. 

Scientific attitude in criticism 
opposed to the aesthetic, 
20,21. 

Sculpture, its development, 153, 
154. 

Self not a primary object of 
interest, 39, 40. 

Sensuous beauty of fundamen- 
tal importance, 80, 81. 

Sex, its relation to aesthetic 
life, 56 et seq. 

Shakespeare, 151, 174, 175; 
quoted, 51, 114, 229, 237, 
261. 

Shelley quoted, 12, 244, 253. 

Sight, its primacy in percep- 
tion, 73, 74. 

Sixe related to beauty, 123, 124. 

Sky, The, its expressiveness, 8. 

Social interests and their aes- 
thetic influence, 62 et $eq. 

Socrates, his utilitarian es- 
thetics, 157. 



Sonnet, The, ITS. 
Sound, 68 et §eq. 
Space, its metaphysical vafoe, 

66, note. 
Stars, the effect analysed, 100 

etseq. 
Stendhal, 61. 
8toic Sublime, The, 241. 
Straight lines, 89, 90. 
Subjectivity of aesthetic values, 

3,4. 
Sublime, The, its independence 

of the expression of evil, 

239 et seq. 
Sublimity, 233 et seq. 
Sybaris, 216. 
Symbolists, 144. 
Symmetry, 91 et seq. 

a principle of individuation, 

93. 
limits of its application, 95. 
Syntactical form, 171 et seq. 

Tacitus, 173, 252. 

Terms, the first and second 
terms in expression de- 
fined, 195. 
influence of the first term 
in the pleasing expres- 
sion of evil, 226 et seq. 

Theory a method of appercep- 
tion, 138 et seq. 

Tragedy mitigated by beauty 
of form and the expres- 
sion of good, 228, 229. 
mitigated by the diversity 

of evils, 229. 
mixed with comedy, 224, 

225,228. 
consists in treatment not In 
subject, 224. 

Translation necessarily inade- 
quate, 168. 

Truth, grounds of its value, 
22,23. 



IHDEX 



275 



Troth, mixture of the expres- 
sion of truth with that 
of evil, 228 et seq. 

Types, their origin, 116 et eeq. 
their value and that of ex- 
amples, 112 et seq. 

Ugly, The, not a cause of pain, 

26. 
Universality not the differentia 

of aesthetic pleasure, 40 

eteeq. 
Utility the principle of organi- 
sation in nature, 156 et 

eeq. 
its relation to beauty, 157 

eteeq. 
the principle of organization 

in the arts, 160 et seq. 



Value, sstthetie value In the 
second term of expres- 
sion, 205 et eeq. 
all in one sense aesthetic, 28 

eteeq. 
physical, practical, and neg- 
ative transformed into 
asthetio, 201 et eeq. 

Venus of Milo, 165, note. 

Virgin Mary, The, 180, 190. 

Whitman, 112. 
Wit,250et«e?. 
Words, 167 et seq. 
Wordsworth quoted, 105. 
Work and play, 25 et eeq. 

Xenophon quoted, 128. 
his Symposium, 157. 



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